Magnificat

Click to continue reading “The Original Partbooks of Cozzolani’s Salmi a Otto voci”

Click to continue reading “Cozzolani’s Laudate Dominum for Soprano and Violins”

Click Here to Stream and Download Cozzolani's Beatus vir Magnificat and Musica Omnia are pleased to announce our latest release – Cozzolani’s extraordinary setting of the psalm Beatus vir. Taking the characteristics of the “salmi bizarri” to an extreme, here Cozzolani manipulates the psalm text into a dialogue and collects ritornelli as she makes her way through the text. The recording features sopranos Catherine Webster, Jennifer Ellis Kampani, Ruth Escher and Andrea Fullington; altos Meg Bragle, Karen Clark, Suzanne Jubenville and Elizabeth Anker; and a continuo team of John Dornenburg, violone, David Tayler, theorbo and Hanneke van Proosdij, organ, with Warren Stewart conducting. Magnificat first performed this compositional tour de force on the San Francisco Early Music Society series in 1999, with later performances at the 2002 Berkeley Early Music Festival, on the Music Before 1800 series in New York in 2003, and in 2007 for the Society for Seventeenth ...

Click to continue reading “Cozzolani Project Releases New Track – O caeli cives”

Click to continue reading “Magnificat Featured on PRX Women’s History Month Program”

Over recent weeks I have been re-discovering the amazing music of Donna Chiara Margarita Cozzolani and the extraordinary talents of the ladies (and a few gentlemen) of Magnificat who brought it all to life. It seems hardly possible that the first of these recordings took place a decade ago, beginning in August 2000, marking one of Musica Omnia's very first projects (We began recording Jaap Schroeder and Penelope Crawford's Atlantis Ensemble the same year.) Having released two "liturgical" versions of a fairly hefty sampling of Cozzolani's music from both 1642 and the grander collection of 1650, we are now finally mining the remaining wealth of material that we captured and preserved all those years ago in order to realize our original goal of presenting all the surviving music by this wonderful and unique composer, who for me exemplifies the second generation of composers of the Italian Baroque. I can recall the atmosphere ...

Click to continue reading ““Soften the voice as if, little by little, going away””

Click to continue reading “Photos from Magnificat’s Cozzolani Performances”

Listen to Cozzolani's Music The San Francisco Classical Voice published the following review by Anna Carol Dudley. It is very gratifying to be recognized so graciously. Bravi tutti to Catherine, Meg, Jennifer, Kristen, Hugh and Hanneke - it was a wonderful week! Magnificat’s dazzling singers have done it again. As part of their ongoing project to perform and record the complete works of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, four singers brought her glorious music vividly to life in a performance Saturday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley. The four women sang music that Cozzolani wrote for the famous singing nuns in her convent, Santa Radegonda, in 17th-century Milan. Cozzolani’s setting of a Christmas Mass, In nativitate Domini (The birthday of the Lord), was written to be sung by a male celebrant — in this concert, Hugh Davies, whose expressive chant framed the work. The women formed a chorus, chanting in unison, then blossoming into ...

Listen to Cozzolani's Music In November 2002, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani's birth, Magnificat hosted a conference on Women and Music in 17th Century Italy at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. In additions to two performances by Magnificat, four scholars presented papers on aspects of the role of women in musical life in Italy during the period. Robert Kendrick, whose research has contributed tremendously to our understanding of Cozzolani and the musical culture in Milan in general, contributed this article and has graciously granted permission to repost it here. We are here to examine the diversity of nuns’ culture in early modern Italy, on the immediate occasion of roughly the 400th anniversary of one sister’s birth—that of the Milanese Benedictine Chiara Margarita Cozzolani—and of the performances of her music brought to you this weekend by Magnificat. If there is anything that we have learned over the past ...

Listen to Cozzolani's Music We are fortunate that Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, unlike most of the nuns composing for convents in the 17th century, had the opportunity to publish some of her music. Had her works not been printed on the press of Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti, they would most likely have met the same fate of the vast majority of music recorded solely in manuscript – lost in a fire, sold as scrap paper, or simply discarded when musical fashions changed. Only two of Cozzolani's four published collections survived into modern times complete: Concerti Sacri … (1642), which includes the four voice Mass that Magnificat will perform in December, and Salmi a Otto Voci … (1650), from which the psalms in our Vespers programs are drawn. Sadly, the one part book from her first publication of motets Primavera di fiori musicali (1640) that survived into the 20th Century was destroyed in 1945 ...

Click to continue reading “The Flowers on Magnificat's Cozzolani CDs”

Click to continue reading “Chiara Margarita Cozzolani: Celestial Siren”

As Magnificat turns our attention to December's performances of the mass setting by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, I decided it would be a good time to repost and expand this article that I wrote two years ago after our performance of a reconstruction of the mass celebrating the 1607 re-dedication of St. Gertrude's Church in Hamburg. The performance of sacred works within a re-construction of a contemporaneous liturgical context has been of feature of Magnificat's concert series since our first season in 1992 with our performances of Schütz's Weinachtshistorie (Christmas Story) in collaboration with the San Francisco Early Music Society. Since then, Magnificat has performed over two dozen programs based on reconstructions of historical liturgies. It has almost become an "article of faith", reinforced by comments from members of our audience and the musicians who have contributed their talents to these performances, that the experience of the work, whether a setting of ...

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

Just a few days after concluding our 2006-2007 season, Magnificat was honored to be presented by the Society for Seventeenth Century Music as part of their annual conference. The concert was a repeat of our subscription series program that featured music of Chiara Margharita Cozzolani in a reconstruction of an Easter Vespers liturgy. The musicians performing were (left to right in the photo) Catherine Webster, Margaret Bragle, Jennifer Ellis, Kristen Dubenion Smith, John Dornenburg, Katherine Heater, Warren Stewart, Elizabeth Anker, David Tayler, Andrea Fullington, Suzanne Elder Wallace, and Jennifer Paulino. The concert took place in the beautiful Patricia George Decio Theatre in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on the Notre Dame campus. The recently built concert hall boasts extraordinarily clear acoustics and the stage crew were exemplary - making us all feel like rock stars. A small but remarkable audience, made up almost entirely of scholars specializing in seventeenth century music, ...

This evening’s program allows us to experience again some of the repertory produced by seventeenth-century Italian cloistered women. Thanks not least to groups like Magnificat, over the last decade the sacred music heard in their institutions throughout the peninsula has made the leap from printed page to a real presence on recordings and in concert. In addition, the work of several SSCM members on sacred music outside convent walls—ranging from problems of tonal organization to those of liturgical use—helps provide a better context in which to understand nuns’ repertory. The basics of tonight’s concert are fairly well-known: music by the Benedictine nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-c.1677), a sister at the musically famous convent of Santa Radegonda, located across the street from Milan Cathedral. Cozzolani’s psalms and motet are here presented as they would have been first heard, in the context of her order's liturgy for Easter Vespers. S. Radegonda ...