6 minute read
3 Medieval & Renaissance gallery
in memory of kevin lavery
This evening’s performance is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and loyal supporter, Kevin Lavery.
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MONTEVERDI 450
at the V&A
As part of Victoria and Albert museum’s Opera: Passion, Power & Politics exhibition, this very special evening will see Sir John Eliot Gardiner. the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists conclude a triumphant year celebrating Monteverdi’s 450th anniversary. The hugely successful Monteverdi 450 Trilogy tour took international audiences by storm, commencing fittingly at Venice’s breathtaking Teatro La Fenice and then travelling onwards to European festivals from Edinburgh to Salzburg and Lucerne before concluding in Chicago and New York.
10 Apr | 8.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Festival de Pâques, Aix-en-Provence
12 Apr | 7.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Colston Hall, Bristol
03 May | 8.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Palau de la Música, Barcelona
08 May | 7.30pm L’incoronazione di Poppea 28 May | 7.30pm L’Orfeo Colston Hall, Bristol
16 Jun | 7pm L’Orfeo 17 Jun | 3.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 18 Jun | 3.30pm L’incoronazione di Poppea 19 Jun | 7pm L’Orfeo 20 Jun | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 21 Jun | 7pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Teatro La Fenice, Venice
26 Jul | 7pm L’Orfeo 28 Jul | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 29 Jul | 7pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Salzburg Festival
14 Aug | 7pm L’Orfeo 15 Aug | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 17 Aug | 7pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Edinburgh International Festival 22 Aug | 7.30pm L’Orfeo 25 Aug | 6.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 26 Aug | 6.30pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Lucerne Festival
02 Sep | 7pm L’Orfeo 03 Sep | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 05 Sep | 7pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Musikfest Berlin
07 Sep | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 08 Sep | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Wratislavia Cantans Festival
16 Sep | 7.30pm L’Orfeo 17 Sep | 7.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 18 Sep | 7.30pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Philharmonie de Paris
12 Oct | 7.30pm L’Orfeo 13 Oct | 7.30pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 15 Oct | 2pm L’incoronazione di Poppea Harris Theater, Chicago
18 Oct | 7pm L’Orfeo 19 Oct | 7pm Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria 21 Oct | 7pm L’incoronazione di Poppea White Light Festival, New York
trilogy tour dates 2017
Tonight, this curtain-closing concert will reunite the MCO ensembles with the tour’s celebrated cast of world-class singers to perform highlights from the trilogy in the Raphael Cartoon Gallery, where 50 years ago Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the newly formed Monteverdi Choir marked the composer’s 400th anniversary.
monteverdi at 450
Monteverdi has been a constant presence in my life since I was a small boy. The older I get the more I find his music life-affirming, endlessly fascinating and utterly glorious. He is the composer with whom I started my career as a conductor and whose music has marked all its milestones and turning points. When in my early twenties I started out as a musician, pestering, but also in some cases convincing my contemporaries about the importance of Monteverdi, I felt I was one of a very small band of like-minded enthusiasts. For us Monteverdi epitomised all that was most alluring, exotic and at the same time most modern about music of the early 17th century. He demanded our attention as much through the passionate utterance as through the glorious colours of his music with which it was painted, whether intended for the church, the chamber of the theatre. Dip your toe in his musical stream and you recognise it as a living, breathing organism.
We became hooked - much in the same way that people are drawn to his contemporaries - Shakespeare, Donne, Rubens and Caravaggio - humanists to a man. All these great creative artists lived through those turbulent years either side of 1600, and each of them made seminal contributions to that ferment of ideas which turned the intellectual life of Europe upside down.
Yet it is worth remembering that fifty years ago in the quatercentenary of his birth Monteverdi was hardly a household name, surprising as it may seem. Keen music lovers might have sung or heard a couple of his madrigals, but only two of his operas had been professionally staged in Britain (L’incoronazione di Poppea at Glyndebourne in 1962 and L’Orfeo at Sadlers Wells Opera in 1964). Clearly a lot more needed to be done to establish his credentials. I remember approaching the then director of the V&A, who warmed to the idea of celebrating Monteverdi’s 400th birthday in the beautiful Raphael Cartoon Gallery. The selection of his secular and dramatic music we put together found a receptive audience and seemed to cause quite a stir.
‘If all the quatercentenary celebrations of Monteverdi’s birth are on this level, we shall have a year to remember.’
Ronald Crichton - Financial Times
‘The concert was overwhelming. The cumulative effect of so ripe a musical pot-pourri left one breathless. Especially when all was sung with such style and conviction by the choir.’
Gillian Widdicombe - The Times
Fifty years on Monteverdi’s place in the musical landscape has changed immeasurably. At least two of his operas crop up quite regularly in staged productions around the world while his Vespers are trotted out almost as regularly as Bach’s Passions, with widely differing approaches. Yet, surprisingly, it is only in the past three decades that Monteverdi’s stature has been widely recognised by his countrymen. There are now several expert groups of performers in Italy today dedicated to exploring his path-breaking meshing of words and music when delivered in his and their mother tongue - a benchmark set and to be greatly welcomed. Yet there is so much more still to be done - via a judicious blend of scholarship and performance. Monteverdi’s reflections on the social fabric of his day apply as much to now as to the 1600s.
For this year, which marks the 450th anniversary of his birth, we set ourselves the task of mounting all three of his surviving opera back to back in enhanced and dramatised concert performances. Our aim was to achieve a significant break-through in public awareness of Monteverdi’s part in this 17th century revolution and to introduce a fresh and younger audience to the immense expressive range and starting modernity of his aesthetic experiments. In the seven months since April we have given 33 performances of his three surviving operas in halls and theatres across Europe and the USA and reaching an audience of over 70,000.
From my personal perspective it has been an unmitigated joy to spend a large part of this year exploring these great works in eight different countries with a wonderful, hand-picked international cast of singers and expert players drawn from eleven different nationalities, many (but alas not all) of whom have reconvened here tonight for our final 450th birthday tribute to Monteverdi. As one of the musicians wrote to me recently, the whole tour felt like sharing a journey with one big family
We have constructed a sequence from the music we have been performing on tour - oddly similar to the one I put together for the quatercentenary concert here in 1967 - enough, we hope, for you to savour some of the excitement, the passion and even the trepidation we have discovered in his music over the past seven months - and dreamt about over the past fifty years.
Sir John Eliot Gardiner Artistic Director and Founder
