Francesco Mauro Guarini News
composer
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2024-03-29
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2021-09-27 06:47:57
From Rinaldo to Amadigi di Gaula: a look at Handel's highly experimental early London period
[…] the thing and Handel's music would have come a poor second to the spectacular sets and transformation scenes. Marco Ricci - Rehearsal for an opera (1709)Ricci was a stage painter at the Queen's Theatre, and this singer is assumed to depict Nicolini, the house's principal castrato. There was then something of a gap, and Handel's next opera Il pastor fido did not debut until November 1712. The opera is based on Giovanni Battista Guarini's influential play, which was written in the 1580s and published in 1590 and formed an important source for pastoral text and imagery for both operas and madrigals. The opera represents a surprising change for Handel, moving to the pastoral after the heroic, but it may have been Handel's intention to demonstrate his versatility. Not for the first time, we come to regret that we have precious little contemporary information about why these particular operas […]
2021-07-20 08:59:40
Young contemporary composers to late Haydn: London Oriana Choir at Opera Holland Park
[…] for many audience members (myself included) hearing a 60-voice choir was something of a novel delight too. The acoustic was probably somewhat drier than the choir was used to, but it wasn't unhelpful and the clarity, combined with the choir's fine diction and clear sound worked well. Vittoria Aleotti was an Italian nun, talented young she published a book of her madrigals in Venice in 1593. T'amo mia vita, her setting of a poem by Guarini, proved to be attractively motet-like and indicative of a composer definitely worth exploring more. Whilst Schütz is certainly better known than Aleotti, we certainly don't hear anything like enough of his music in concert programmes, and it was a welcome treat to come across his Selig sind die Toten. Probably performed on a rather different scale than the composer intended, however the motet benefited from the attentive choristers' lithe sound and sense of drama. […]
2019-08-05 13:46:07
Concerto delle donne II
[…] most famous citizen of Mantua”). Alfonoso II, Duke of Ferrara, visited Mantua in 1580 and, taken by Laura’s beauty and singing, asked his wife (!), Margherita Gonzaga to write to her father, Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, asking for his permission to hire Laura Peverara. The permission was given, and Laura, accompanied by her father, moved to Ferrara, to the consternation of the ladies of the court. In Ferrara, she found success immediately: Giovanni Battista Guarini, a poet and father of Anna Guarini, who would later join Peverara in Concerto delle donne, wrote a sonnet in which he praised her singing. Duke Alfonso had wanted to have an ensemble of female singers since he heard Tarquinia Molza, the famous singer and composer, in Modena in 1568. He already had two fine amateur singers,noblewomen Lucrezia Bendidio (the lover of the poet Torquato Tasso and then, later, of Cardinal Luigi d'Este) […]
2019-07-29 13:38:47
Concerto delle donne, 2019
[…] was probably the one to organize them into a more formal and eventually professional ensemble. Regular concerts were given for the Duke, and Concerto del donne became one of the featured performers. This was the only ensemble of female singers in all of Italy, and the quality of their singing, according to witnesses, was extraordinary. We know the names of some of the singers, such as Laura Peverara, the lead singer, Livia d'Arco and Anna Guarini, but they don’t tell us much, although the composer Francesco Manara compiled a number of madrigals in honor of Lauda Peverara. We also know about the people closely associated with the Concerto. One of them was Tarquinia Molza, a singer, poet, composer, and philosopher, and also a lady-in-waiting to Duchess Margherita Gonzaga d'Este, Alfonso’s wife. She was considered a virtuosa, both as a singer and as a violist, so much so that her performances […]
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