Early-Music Seminars 2014 | Alessandro Stradella 1639-1682. Seven cantatas rediscovered in Fondazione Giorgio Cini archives

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
plus May, 1721 2014

In keeping with approach adopted in the new series of early music seminars begun in 2007, under the direction of Pedro Memelsdorff, this year’s seminar will be devoted to a completely unpublished repertoire in a manuscript source recently rediscovered in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini archives: seven cantatas for voice and basso continuo by Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682).
In summer 2012, musicologist Giulia Giovani – at the time she had a scholarship to the Vittore Branca International Centre for the Study of Italian Culture – was doing research in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini music archives when she came across a manuscript containing twenty-one cantatas and two arias, mostly for soprano and basso continuo, by Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682). The document was in the Archive of Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), one of the most important composers whose archives are housed in the Fondazione Cini. Certainly drafted in the Veneto area and probably in Venice in the second half of the 17th-century, the manuscript is important evidence of the reception of Stradella’s music in Venice and is the only source containing
some chamber cantatas previously not in the catalogue of his compositions.
As usual, the seminar – this year directed by the celebrated early music conductor René Jacobs – will host a number of scholarship holders selected by means of an international competition for professional or semi-professional singers; at the final concert, they will perform the world première of the previously unknown works.