Barbara Strozzi: Cantatas

Over het evenement

Adept in the Baroque repertoire and Monteverdi, and singing often under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini, Anna Simboli returns to perform works by Barbara Strozzi, accompanied on the lute by Laura‐Mónica Pustilnik, a member of Le Concert d’Astrée, in a recital that probes the harmonic meanderings of the human heart.

There are few female composers in the history of music, and we don’t expect to find one in Venice in the middle of the 17th century. Barbara Strozzi is certainly an exception for her time! Adoptive daughter of a poet whose texts were used by Monteverdi and Cavalli, it is the latter who took it upon himself to teach her the art of music. A cantatrice, she composed exclusively for voice, and counted among her admirers the Doge of Venice himself and the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. Her music displays great melodic invention and expressiveness derived straight from Monteverdi’s seconda practicea, of which she could have learned from Cavalli who had been his student: great freedom in the use of dissonance, particular attention to the articulations of the text and to the effects these can generate.

Frescobaldi, organist at Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, was long one the most influential Italian composers in Europe. It is through him, and through the staggering quantity of his works that were printed and distributed, that Italian tastes penetrated into Germany:  many of his scores were copied by Bach and came to have a decisive influence on the latter’s style.