Categoria Evento: Conferences and Seminars

The Twinned Labyrinths seminar pays homage to the Venetian composer Antonio Caldara, a singer, violinist and cellist in the Cappella Ducale San Marco and a long-term guest in the residences of Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli, including Vignanello Castle (Viterbo), where he met some of the most distinguished musicians of the age and composed an immense  repertoire of cantatas, serenades and oratorios. Some of these pieces were performed in the courtyards and gardens of the prince, including the famous Vignanello Giardino di verdure, a kind of garden maze built by Ottavia Orsini in 1611.
The seminar will focus on instrumental chamber repertoires and the works composed during the Vignanello period, with a special emphasis on cantatas and serenades. There will be master-classes by Amandine Beyer and lectures for violinists and solo singers, with a final concert on 4 February at the Squero Auditorium. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, the seminar has been organised by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini with the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance and the Irma Merk and L. + Th. La Roche Foundations (Basel, Switzerland).

Closely related to the previous meeting held in November 2018, this seminar is addressed to solo singers of all registers of voices, especially haut-contres (high tenors) and sopranos with very agile coloratura. The scholarship holders will be guided by expert teachers and assisted by specialists of the French late Baroque and style galant repertoire. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, this second date with early music will be dedicated to the operatic repertoires of the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, and especially the career of the first coloured singer to play lead roles in French opera, the daughter of a freed slave whose stage name was Minette. After her theatrical debut in February 1781, Minette played lead roles in over forty productions (operas, melodramas and French comedies), thus establishing a sort of legend, but also arousing considerable social controversy, recorded by the local periodicals of the time. Among the repertoires performed by Minette are libretto settings (or their paraphrases) by writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, whose theme was racial differences and slavery, and therefore inevitably also emancipation. This detail gives the topic a special sociological interest. The highly acclaimed coloured singer was never remunerated for her performances due to her origins as a slave. She defied traditionalist criticism, however, and excited the mixed elite of her audiences who saw in her the desired but feared symbol of racial hybridisation.
Furthermore, singing and acting in comedies such as L’amant statue by Nicolas Dalayrac or Jean Martini L’amoureux de quinze ans and, especially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, gave voice to an interracial dialogue that was to greatly impress 18th-century “Haitian” audiences.

The seminar will end with a public concert at the Squero Auditorium on 22 February 2019 at 6.00 pm.
The programme includes arias and opera scenes by composers such as Adolphe Blaise, Johann Paul Aegidius Martini, Egidio Duni and Nicolas Dalayrac. The featured works are not revivals of the versions performed in their Parisian premières from 1770 to 1780, but the  versions sung in the theatres of Port-au-Prince, in the French-Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, by Elisabeth Ferrand, better known as Minette, the first coloured soloist in the history of opera. Her dazzling (but subsequently overlooked) career from 1781 to 1789,  revolutionized traditions and marked the history of theatre and music in America and Europe.

Contest Winners:
Javier Coronado, haute-contre
Maya Kherani, soprano
Maria Lueiro, soprano
Lila Powell Khazoum, soprano
Héctor dos Santos, bass
Belen Vaquero, mezzo-soprano
Benjamin Gaspon, traverso

Coadiuvants:
Ignacio Ramal & Guadalupe del Moral, violin
Alaia Ferrán, viola
Neven Lesage e Lucile Tessier, oboe
Alejandro Pérez, bassoon
Hyngun Cho, cello
Pablo Kornfeld, harpsichord

Teachers:
Vivica Genaux, mezzo-soprano
Pedro Memelsdorff, director
Lisandro Abadie, assistant

The early music seminars, directed by Pedro Memelsdorff since 2006, take place at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini twice a year in February and October, thanks to the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance, the Fondation Irma Merk and the Fondation L. + Th. La Roche (Basel, Switzerland). The October seminar is devoted to the Roman de Fauvel, a long early 14th-century satirical poem attributed to Gervais du Bus, a clerk at the court of the King Philip IV (the Fair) of France.

Based on the metaphor of an ass – Fauvel – who had become a monarch through a twist of fate, the Roman is a caustic criticism of the royal court and church and was banned for being heretical and seditious. This did nothing to diminish its popularity, however. Published around 1310-14, the Roman was almost immediately interpolated with some remarkable images and, most importantly, pieces of music composed in a variety of monophonic and polyphonic styles, including some of the most sophisticated motets of the French Ars nova, attributed to the poet, composer and diplomatic Philippe de Vitry.

The seminar will explore the complex cross-media relations between test, image and music as found in the richest interpolated version of the Roman – manuscript no. 146 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – with some of the greatest experts on the subject: Benjamin Bagby, founder and director of the celebrated medieval ensemble Sequentia, and the eminent musicologists Margaret Bent and Anna Zayaruznaya (Universities of Oxford and Yale).

On Friday, 12 October at 6pm the scholarship-holders (selected through an international call for applications), directed by Benjamin Bagby will perform in a public concert at the Auditorium “Lo Squero”

Inés Alonso Botella, soprano
Roberta Diamond, soprano
Ozan Karagöz, tenore
Jung Min Kim, soprano
Sylvia Leith, mezzo soprano
Laura Martínez Boj, soprano
Wolodymyr Smishkewych, tenore
Raphaële Soumagnas, soprano
Belén Vaquero Hernandez, soprano

Free entrance

10 May, 5 pm
Venice, Palazzo Grimani

Inauguration of the 2013 Early Music Seminars organised by Pedro Memelsdorff
in collaboration with the Special Superintendency for the Historical, Artistic and Ethno-Anthropological Heritage and for the Museums of the City of Venice and of Towns on the Lagoon Belt

Introductory lecture  by Alfonso de Vicente on the motets composed by Tomás Luis de Victoria in Rome and Madrid.

Print invitation

13 May,  9.30 am – 6.30 pm
Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
International study day: Tomás Luis de Victoria in Rome and Madrid

15 May  18

Venice, Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore
Concert in collaboration with the Abbacy of San Giorgio Maggiore

Free admission

This seminar in the new series of Early Music Seminars at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, is dedicated to the repertoire of motets, psalms and antiphonals devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary composed by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). There will be a special focus on various interpretive traditions, principally Italian and Spanish. One of the most important composers of sacred music in late 16thcentury Europe, Tomás Luis de Victoria combined the infl uence of the best Spanish polyphonic composers who had preceded him at Avila – Espinar, Ribera, Navarro and Cabezón – with the Italian composers whom he had come across in his twenty-year stay in Rome, where he may even have studied with Palestrina. In addition to the historically accurate reconstruction and stylistic analyses of Victoria’s
motets, there will also be a focus on performances and performing history. Of particular interest is the comparison between Italian and Spanish traditions as regards the make-up of the groups of singers and the instrumental accompaniment for liturgical polyphonic singing, a practice well documented in early 17th-century Spain. For this purpose, two ensembles of scholarship holders (chosen through the usual call for applications) and an organ accompanist will be invited to take part. These young talented musicians will be mainly conducted by Rinaldo Alessandrini (from Concerto Italiano) and Josep Borràs (an organologist, bassoon player and director of the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya). They will be fl anked by other international experts on 17th-century Spanish liturgical music. The seminar will be opened by an introductory lecture at the Palazzo Grimani in collaboration with the Special Superintendency for the Historical, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museum Centre of the City of Venice and Lagoon Settlements. On 15 May the seminar will end with the traditional concert open to the public. The early music seminars are held with the support of the Veneto Region.