The Programme
Music in the Veneto, 23–28 June 2014 Vicenza, from A Dawdle in Lombard & Venice by Inglis Sheldon-Williams 1928.
Devotional Vivaldi Liturgical masterpieces for counter-tenor & orchestra
Chiesa di San Filippo Neri, Vicenza Andreas Scholl (counter-tenor) Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca
Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) was as accomplished a composer of spiritually uplifting devotional music as of instrumental compositions and opera – after all, he was a priest. The programme includes Vivaldi settings of Nisi Dominus and Stabat Mater. They were composed while he was maestro di concerti at the Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage for girls in Venice to which Il Prete Rosso (The Red Priest) brought Europe-wide fame through his musical activities.
Carnevale Veneziano Venice & the Veneto on holiday
Villa Contarini, Piazzola sul Brenta
I Fagiolini, Robert Hollingworth (director)
‘It might be a new Golden Age of the counter-tenor, but few can equal the sheer beauty of tone and dramatic instinct displayed by Andreas Scholl’ (BBC Music Magazine, February 2012). For over two decades he has thrilled audiences worldwide with his opera and concert performances, and dazzled with a series of extraordinary recordings. He brings to his art not just a voice of incomparable beauty and expressiveness but also an acute intelligence allied with historical understanding. A versatile and experimental artist – his latest acclaimed recording is of German Lieder – but with this programme he happily returns to his core repertoire, the Italian Baroque.
Venice at Carnival: six to ten weeks of misbehaviour between Christmas and Lent. The population doubled in size and the best musicians and commedia dell’arte groups consorted with patricians and princes in whose palazzi their ticketed performances took place. I Fagiolini re-create an evening of mascarate, madrigals and musical mayhem by Giovanni Croce’s own close harmony group of St. Mark’s singing men. Caricatures by Croce himself; a trip along the Brenta canal courtesy of a supposed Benedictine monk; Andrea Gabrieli’s dialect lament calling on the lagoon’s seafood to bewail the death of Willaert; excerpts from Vecchi’s madrigal comedy L’Amfiparnaso (Twin Peaks).
Founded in Treviso (a city in the Veneto awarded during the Renaissance the epithet ‘Marca Gioiosa’), the Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca have become one of the most acclaimed period instrument groups in Italy, renowned both for their Vivaldi interpretations and for their study of lesser-known composers of the Veneto.
The Contarini were one of the richest and most powerful of Venetian clans, and their villa at Piazzola sul Brenta spreads around courts and gardens and canals with commensurate splendour. At its heart is a villa of the 1540s, controversially attributed to Palladio, but it was much extended and ornamented in several campaigns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, resulting in the most Baroque of the great villas of the Veneto. The concert takes place in a purpose-built music room.
The Church of St Filippo Neri is situated in Corso Palladio, the main street of Vicenza. Though it was built in 1730, a century and a half after Palladio’s death, and the façade was added a hundred years after that, essentially it is Palladian in style, demonstrating the extraordinary longevity of the great architect’s influence in the Veneto.
The tragic mode is a necessity for vocal ensembles specialising in Renaissance music, and I Fagiolini are no exception, but they are distinguished also by their talent for comedy.
Above left: I Fagiolini (©Danny Higgins). Above: Andreas Scholl (©James McMillan and Decca).
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