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Decorated ensemble goes for baroque
Matt Carney/The Daily
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Rare instruments and foreign nomenclature will be aplenty Friday night when renowned baroque Italian ensemble Armonia Celeste plays a free concert at Gothic Hall in Catlett Music Center.
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“I think this music is quite ornate,” said Eugene Enrico, professor of musicology. “The beauty of the three women singers’ voices will be quite entertaining.”
The performance coincides with Enrico’s 26th public television special, a production for PBS entitled “Culture Wars of Venice and the Birth of Public Opera” that will feature four songs performed Friday by visiting ensemble Armonia Celeste, a group noted for their use of instruments genuine to a golden age of learning within classical music.
“One of the instruments featured is a triple harp…it allows a very rich sound,” Enrico said, himself a conductor and active musician.
Also featured will be the theorbo and lute, distant ancestors of the modern guitar. A film and rehearsal production assistant, musicology graduate student Jaime Carini said the concert will be a learning experience.
“Come to this concert expecting to encounter something new,” she said.
Italian or not, listeners will be moved by the aesthetic beauty of opera’s native tongue as it cleverly addresses the many forms of love.
The concert, titled “The Cycle of Love: Enchantment to Betrayal,” will feature pieces composed by Barbara Strozzi, Claudio Monteverdi and Luigi Rossi. The program’s selections progress from the early stages of young lovers’ awakening to passion, seduction and consummation before steering off into betrayal, unrequited love and suffering. Don’t let such rocky material prevent you from bringing a date though, as the concert ends on a hopeful note, Rossi’s “Fan battaglia”.
Musicians and opera fans will constitute only part of the showing’s audience, as Enrico’s special offers much for history buffs as well.
These early baroque composers did well to create such beautiful and provocative music in an oppressive environment — the very same inquisition that reduced Galileo to house arrest for the remainder of his life. These composers found a safe haven in Venice, a city friendly to publishers and public opera. Enrico will document this conflict in his special which will shoot on location this summer in Padua.
Armonia Celeste is the product of fellow academic musician Lyle Nordstrom, whose work Enrico has followed since the 1960s and praises as “outstanding”. The ensemble will play free of charge for students at 8 p.m. Friday. “The students are getting a free concert that they wouldn’t have if we hadn’t done this piggyback [with the special]”, Enrico said.
Audiences are saying...
| “What a joy! Thank you!!!!” - Tim B. |
| “You made me a big fan tonight!” – Julie D. |
| “PHENOMENAL concert in Boston this morning! Thanks for the experience!” – David L. |
| “Is there a recording of the boston concert that I could buy? That really was PHENOMENAL!!” – John B. |
| "Fabulous!" - C.F.M. |
| "Fantastic!!!" - Jennie C. |
Download Armonia Celeste's official press kit here.
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