Magnificat

The following thoughtful review was posted at the blog Exotic and Irrational Entertainment by "Pessimissimo". I especially appreciate the recognition of the excellent program notes by Suzanne Cusick, who contributed tremendously to my understanding of Francesca and her "show". The reviewer's comments about Pulcinella are well taken, I would only point out that, the commedia figures were not only associated with Sicilian theatre, but with Italian theater in general and the performance of commedia troupes at any event like the visit of a foreign dignitary, especially during Carnival was taken for granted (and in fact mandatory for the companies enjoying the protection of the Medici). That being said, they certainly were not part of the original performance in 1625, but then neither were puppets of any sort. Thanks for such a well considered review! This past week in the Bay Area the Baroque vocal group Magnificat (in collaboration with the Carter ...

Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle attended last Saturday's sold out performance in Berkeley and has posted a review available online here. We have posted more photos on our Flickr Photostream. Everyone perfromed beautifully and we had standing ovations for each performance. Thanks to everyone - performers, audience, staff and board - for making last weekend a tremendous success!

Click to continue reading “Palo Alto Online Preview: Marionettes Meet 17th-Century Feminism”

Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight wrote the following preview of Magnificat's upcoming production of Francesca Caccini's La Liberazione di Ruggiero for San Francisco Classical Voice. And that’s just what you can see next month when Magnificat Baroque, in collaboration with the Carter Family Marionettes, presents Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Ruggiero from the island of Alcina) on Oct. 16, 17, and 18 in three venues. In La liberazione, the wicked sorceress Alcina seduces the warrior Ruggiero, who dwells happily on Alcina’s island until finally the good sorceress Melissa shames him into returning to battle — and, incidentally, to his fiancée, the warrior maiden Bradamante. The plot comes from an episode in the epic Renaissance poem Orlando Furioso, by Ariosto, which is in turn based on the medieval French poem The Song of Roland. That’s where the puppets come in. The Carter Family Marionettes, who are ...

A very 2009 moment occurred the other day when, allowing myself to be distracted from working on the score for La Liberazione di Ruggiero, I noticed a tweet from @krashangel about the fact that the ciaconna used in Rene Jacobs’ recording  and DVD of Cavalli’s La Calisto was actually not by Cavalli, but rather by Tarquinio Merula. Before I had a chance to marvel at the fact that Tarquinio Merula had actually been mentioned in Twitterspace, there was a follow up tweet observing, accurately, that "it was the custom to use ritornelli and sinfonie composed by others as a contingent ‘filler’ in Venetian operas in the 17th century". What made this tweeting encounter remarkable was that at that very moment (or at least before being distracted) I was in the process of doing just that: inserting incidental music into an opera score (albeit a Florentine opera) to allow for scene changes, ...

(This is the second of a three part essay on Francesca Caccini and La Liberzione di Ruggiero, which Magnificat will perform October 16-18. The first part, a biographical sketch of Francesca, "About Francesca", was posted here earlier.) On February 3, 1625, sometime in daylight, 160 gentildonne and their husbands, and an unknown number of foreign guests rode in carriages out the southeastern gate of Florence, and half a mile up a tree-lined avenue to a villa atop the nearest hill that had very recently been renovated as the personal palace of Tuscany’s regent, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Leaving their carriages in a grassy courtyard guarded by two squadrons of armed cavalry, the Archduchess’ guests were welcomed into the palace by a military commander, and led to bench seats in a temporary theatre built in the villa’s loggia, to hear a new commedia in musica based on a well-known plot (two sorceresses ...

Chloe Veltman recently posted an interesting commentary on the notion of "site specific theatre" with reference to the recent production of Dido and Aeneas by San Francisco's Urban Opera ("Not All Site Specific Theatre is Created Equal"). She proposed that "in order for a theatrical production to be site specific, it needs to be conceived specifically for the space in which it is produced," and therefore "space becomes a performer, with the potential to change the entire relationship between text, visuals, sounds and the human body in fascinating ways." In the context of her article I personally like her narrow definition, but it got me thinking that since any work of performance art exists only in the moment of performance, each performance is in some sense a new work, created freshly in a new "site" and therefore "site specific" for that performance. Of course what Chloe was refering to with her definition ...

I have just received my copy of Suzanne Cusick's very impressive monograph "Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power". Quite apart from it's relevance to Magnificat's production of Caccini's opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero next Fall, the book promises to offer fascinating insights into the role of music in Italian society and the experience of a woman navigating the politics of a North Italian court.

Magnificat will open our 2009-2010 season with Francesca Caccini's opera "The Liberation of Ruggiero". I am looking forward to reading New York University Professor Suzanne Cusick's new book about this remarkable composer. The book is available for order on the University of Chicago Press website. The synopsis provided by the publisher follows: A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant figure of musical life there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals, for the first time, how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women ...

On the weekend of October 16-18, 2009, Magnificat will join forces with The Carter Family Marionettes in a production first mounted in Seattle in 2007. Below is a review of that production from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. We look forward to working with the Stephen and Chris Carter and their troupe of wooden friends! Marionettes Make Fine Work of Italian Opera by Phillipa Kiraly (originally posted on April 22, 2007 at the Seattle Post Intelligencer) Kudos to the Northwest Puppet Center for doing it yet again: opera in miniature with all the trimmings. On Friday night, "The Liberation of Ruggiero from the Island of Alcina," by Francesca Caccini, opened at the center with five singers, four musicians, more than 30 puppets and a wave machine. "Ruggiero" was one of the earliest operas, written in 1625; the first written by a woman -- Caccini was a younger contemporary of composer Claudio Monteverdi; and the first ...

Click to continue reading “Puppets, Nuns, Melodies, and Masterpieces: Magnificat’s 18th Season Takes a Tour of Italy”