Claudio Monteverdi – Vespro della Beata Vergine

Monteverdi vespers have been subject of intense interest among early music performers for many years. The dedication to Pope Paul V, the grand dimensions, the vocal and instrumental virtuosity, the musical colour and extraordinary variety displayed in the collection of… Read more »

L’Arte de Correa de Arauxo

From Franco-Flemish Polyphony to the Spanish organ tradition Correa de Arauxo’s surviving music is all contained in a single volume entitled Libro de tientos y discursos de música practica, y theorica de organo intitulado Facultad organica (Alcalá, 1626). This publication is exceptional in many aspects: the number and… Read more »

Enchanted forests – Guédron/Praetorius/Monteverdi

In Italy prior to the invention of opera, composers conceived of musical interludes mixing song, dance and theatre around large mythological frescos. In France, court ballets also married poetry, vocal and instrumental music, choreography and scenography. From the beginning of… Read more »

Musica ex Machina

Composers and theorists of the Renaissance cultivated a strong fascination with the internal mechanisms of music. Counterpoint was conceptualized as a perpetual reflection of the universe’s divine organisation: intervals, time signatures and proportions could be perfect or imperfect. InAlto performs… Read more »

Les Cris! City sounds of the 16th and 17th centuries

We often tend to think of the past as something lifeless, colourless, and silent. But just as ‘silent’ movies were rarely without sound or without colour, the towns and cities of the past were bristling with life.Moreover, they were anything… Read more »

Teatro Spirituale

Lent and penance in Rome ca.1600 The « Chiesanuova » was built in Rome in the second half of the 16th century, on the older Santa Maria in Valicella, as the base for the Congregation of the Oratorio, founded by Filippo Neri…. Read more »

Mein Herz ist bereit

Christmas in a desolate land Heinrich Schütz published his second opus of Symphoniae Sacrae in 1647, just a year before the peace treatises of Westphalia finally put an end to the thirty years war (1618-1648). Recent demographic studies claim that… Read more »

E vidi quattro stelle

This program is built around two of the most influential writers in Italian medieval literature: Dante Aligheri and Francesco Petrarca. Their texts were extremely famous among composers of the 16th and 17th century composers looking for a very deep and… Read more »

Schütz and his legacy

Heinrich Schütz and his most illustrious followers Heinrich Schütz was remarked at an early age by Moritz von Hessen-Kassel as an extremely gifted singer and very promising musician. The Landgrave decided to personally take over his education and paid for… Read more »

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