Salon/Sanctuary Concerts 2016 Sacro/Profano Festival
Il Filo d’Arianna / Ariadne’s Thread
Schedule*
Sunday, June 5th 5:00pm
The Limonaia of Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120 50139 Firenze, It
EROS ΕΡΩΣ
Greek music to 6th century BC poetry
Ensemble Melpomen
Arianna Savall, soprano (A) and Bárbitos/Lýra (a)
Giovanni Cantarini, tenor (B) and Kithára/Lýra (b)
Martin Lorenz, Týmpana (c), Kýmbala (d), Krótala (e)
Conrad Steinmann, Aulós (f), Kýmbala (g); music and direction
Villa La Pietra’s The Season and the Sacro/Profano festival of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts open with EROS ΕΡΩΣ, a program that honors the origin of Renaissance inspiration with a theatrical concert of reconstructed music of ancient Greece, created and performed by Ensemble Melponem. The model for the Florentine Camerata in their creation of opera and the foundation of Western dramatic expression is given voice in this performance of reconstructed ancient Greek music and lyric text, featuring traces of Sappho, Anacreaon, Theognis, Solon, and Mimnermos.
Thursday, June 9th
7:30pm – Dinner
9:00pm – Performance
The Portico of the Great Synagogue of Florence
Via Luigi Carlo Farini, 6, 50121 Firenze
From Ghetto to Cappella
Interfaith Exchanges in the Music of Baroque Italy
Ensemble L’Aura Soave Cremona
Jessica Gould, soprano & Noa Frenkel, contralto
Diego Cantalupi, lute & Davide Pozzi, harpsichord & organ
Ancient Hebrew chants, along with works of Strozzi, Marcello, Salamone Rossi and others attest to a lively exchange of musical ideas at a time of great oppression and segregation. Salon/Sanctuary Concerts’ original program commemorating the 500th anniversary of the construction of the Venetian Ghetto opens the season of Balagan Café, a week of Jewish music events at the Great Synagogue of Florence.
Friday, June 10th 8pm
The Chapel of Santa Felicità
Piazza Santa Felicita, 3, 50125 Firenze, Italy
I Dilettosi Fiori
Corina Marti, Double Recorder and Clavisymbalum
Late fourteenth-century instrumental music that forms the core of this concerts comes from the two most important surviving sources of this repertoire: the London and the Faenza codices. Corina Marti sets out “in search of the delightful flowers” (Jacopo da Bologna) hidden in those two distinct universes of Late Medieval music, the monophonic and the polyphonic. The remarkable variety of the period is heard in the sound of recorders (including the double recorder so frequently seen in the fourteenth-century Italian iconography) and of a clavisimbalum – a reconstruction of the earliest form of a harpsichord.
Saturday, June 11th 6pm
The Church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi “Dante’s Church”
Via Santa Margherita, 50122 Firenze
Rime Dolci e Leggiadre
The Musical Legacy of the ‘Dolce Stil Nuovo’ Poets
Ensemble La Morra
VivaBiancaLuna Biffi, voice and fiddle Giovanni Cantarini, voice
Corina Marti, recorders and clavisimbalum Michał Gondko, lute
Sung excerpts from Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’, music by Francesco Landini, Paolo da Firenze, songs of Hell and Purgatory performed side by side with sweet sonnets of Dante’s trecento resound through the church where the poet met his Beatrice and where his beloved’s tomb lies.
Sunday, June 12th 5pm
The Cortile of Palazzo Bardi
Via dè Benci, 5, Firenze
Reservations are required for this concert. Please email to make a reservation.
Camerata
Arias from the Birth of Opera
Noa Frenkel, contralto & Diego Cantalupi, lute
The musicians and humanists of the Florentine Camerata, also known as the Camerata de’ Bardi, looked back to ancient Greek Drama in their creation of a new art form. In the cortile of Bruneleleschi’s Palazzo Bardi, which once housed a theater where new works were aired, a program unfolds of comedy and tragedy from the dawn of opera. Included with works of Peri, Frescobaldi, Caccini and others, is Monteverdi’s great Lamento d’Arianna, an artefact of an opera that remains undiscovered to this day.
Monday, June 13th 8pm
The Cappella di San Luca (Cappella dei Pittori) of Santissima Annunziata
Piazza SS Annunziata, 50122 Firenze, Italy
I Viaggi di Caravaggio
Jessica Gould, soprano & Diego Cantalupi, lute
Chiaroscuro, or the theatrical contrast of light and dark, is a term that applies not just to baroque painting but to music as well. Seicento composers elucidated texts through sudden shifts in sonic color. A fresco of Vasari sets the stage for this concert of sacred seicento repertoire by Ferrari, Merula, Sances, Rigatti, and Kapsberger, presented in the famous “Artists’ Chapel” of the Accademia, founded in 1563 by Cosimo dei Medici.
Tuesday, June 14th 8pm
The Church of Santa Felicità
Piazza Santa Felicita, 3, 50125 Firenze, Italy
La Voce di Santa Felicità
Lucia Baldacci, organ
The two organs of the Church of Santa Felicità have faced each other across the aisle since they were constructed in the 1580’s and played by Frescobaldi and Galileo’s Daughter, respectively. Looking down upon the sanctuary is the Palco dei Medici, the secret loft that allowed the Medici to worship, hidden and protected from the hoi poloi below. An organist of Santa Maria Novella and the Duomo performs a program divided between each instrument.
Wednesday, June 15th 8:00pm
La Sala dell’Accademia delle Arti del Disegno
Via Orsanmichele, 4, 50123 Firenze
L’Eredità Caravaggiesca / The Inheritance of Caravaggio
From Stylus Phantasticus to Stile Galante
Diego Cantalupi, lute
The scientific discoveries of the seicento rocked the foundations of religious authority that had existed for centuries. The ensuing stylistic revolutions in the arts led to a new aesthetic of jolts and shifts, known as “fantastic style.” A solo lute recital of works by Castaldi, Gionancelli, and Zamboni by one of Italy’s leading lutenists offers a window onto the twilight of the baroque
Thursday, June 16th 7:00pm
L’Accademia Bartolomeo Cristofori
Via di Camaldoli 9/R 50124 Firenze
Il Filo d’Arianna/Ariadne’s Thread
Jessica Gould, soprano & Kostja Kostic, clarinet
Diego Cantalupi, guitar & Davide Pozzi, fortepiano
The Neo-Classical aesthetic revolution followed the one in the streets. As Liberté, Egalitè, et Fraternité tore down the barriers of the ancien regime, the artistic world found the Greeks once again, inspired by the simplicity, balance, and logic inherent in Classical form. However, this love affair with order could last only a short time, with racous Romanticism lurking around the corner. A swing from Apollo to Dionysus forms the contours of our final program, as a pair of farewells by Mozart (Parto, Parto) and Haydn (Arianna a Naxos) bookmarks a modern-day premiere by by Puccini’s grandfather and the Romantic stirrings of the German Louis Spohr.
* Artists and venues subject to change