While reveling in the beauty of music from the past, we seldom consider the “office politics” and professional competition that surrounded its composition and original performance. The goal of simultaneously creating beauty and paying rent has always been proven challenging and even among highly respected and gainfully employed artists, competition has frequently led to conflict.
In his biographical sketch of Alessandro Grandi, published previously on this blog, Steven Saunders mentions the composer’s rapid rise to positions of authority at the Basilica of San Marco after returning from Ferrara in 1617. Among the positions that he attained was capo, or head, of the Compagnia di San Marco, a group not unlike a modern musicians’ union that organized singers for “freelance work” outside the basilica.
Already in the 15th Century, musical activity outside the Basilica had been organized through confraternities known as Scuole Grandi. In his seminal article on organizations of musicians in Venice, ...
The Jubilate Orchestra, a project of Magnificat, will perfrom with Bay Choral Guild on November 20, 21, and 22 . The program features Handel's marvelous setting of Psalm 109 Dixit Dominus, Alessandro Scarlatti's Messa di Santa Cecilia, and Monteverdi's setting of Psalm 112 Beatus vir.
Magnificat's relationship with Bay Choral Guild is almost as old as Magnificat. The Jubilate Orchestra (then called the Magnificat Baroque Orchestra) first performed with Bay Choral Guild (then called Baroque Choral Guild) in March 1989, joining with the choir in J.S. Bach's motet Jesu meine freude. Since then, Jubilate has collaborated with BCG almost every season, first under Robert Geary and more recently under music director Sanford Dole.
In addition to projects with BCG, Jubilate has performed with the Sanford Dole Ensemble with the choir of St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church, which Sanford also directs. Active in the Bay Area as a conductor, singer and composer for ...
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 ...
In the late Spring of 1608, a tragedy brought together the worlds of comedy and opera in Mantua for a magical performance.
The coming season marks the 10th anniversary of Catherine Webster's first appearances with Magnificat. Her debut in our performances of the music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani in December 1999 was especially memorable and she has been a fixture in Magnificat productions ever since. In October she will sing the role of Alcina in Francesca Caccini's La Liberazione di Ruggiero. The Alcina role features the extraordinary "complaint", in which the evil but alluring sorceress, upon the news that Ruggiero has forsaken her to return to Bradamante and to his soldierly duties, attempts to change his mind first through pleading, then seduction, and finally fury. Caccini masterfully captures this emotional range with an exhilirating panoply of expressive musical devices. We are all looking forward to hearing Catherine sing one of the first great sorprano roles in the history of opera.
Magnificat has released two tracks from live performances that feature Catherine. The first ...
In February, 2010, Magnificat will present concerts of music by Alessandro Grandi, a prolific and highly respected North Italian composer, who had languished under the shadow of Monteverdi for four centuries. Few of Grandi's compositions have been published in modern editions, but fortunately this situation will be rectified by the forthcoming publication of the composer's complete works by the American Institute of Musicology.
Steven Saunders, Dana Professor of Music Colby College and one of the editors of the complete works has graciously granted Magnificat permission to post the biography of Grandi that he has written that will appear in that publication.
The outlines of Alessandro Grandi’s biography have long been established, thanks to contributions by Francesco Caffi, Denis Arnold, Renate Günther, Jerome Roche, Martin Seelkopf, Maurizio Padoan, and James Moore. The broad contours of Grandi’s story are straightforward—so straightforward, in fact, that Arnold could distill their essence into just a few ...
Claudio Monteverdi wrote in a letter in the 1630s that the goal of music was "to speak through singing”. In spending much of my life researching, promoting, and performing the "new music" of the 17th century with Magnificat, I have observed that this music is indeed characterized by an underlying, urgent impulse to "speak" the human experience through music. It is precisely the intensity of that impulse that continues to draw me and the musicians of Magnificat to music of this fascinating, unsettled, and dynamic period. [1]
The 17th century was a period of pervasive upheaval, a century when the fundamental perceptions of the world in all realms of life were shaken. It was a time when alchemy and empirical science coexisted, a time when the exploration of new worlds and the investigation of the sky challenged traditional conceptions of the place of the earth in the universe, a time of religious ...
Magnificat’s 18th Season will be a grand tour through four Italian cities: Florence, Milan, Venice, and Mantua. Along the way, we will hear a delightful puppet opera, a glorious mass for Christmas, a program of madrigals and motets, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the early Baroque. The season feature music by two remarkable women and two pioneers of the new music of the seventeenth century.
Giovanni Antonio Rigatti is a name that until recent times was virtually unknown to music history. Living in Venice in the first half of the 17th-century, he has been overshadowed by his famous contemporaries, the chapel masters and vice chapel masters of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice: Claudio Monteverdi, Alessandro Grandi, Giovanni Rovetta and Francesco Cavalli. Thanks to the research and publications of an international coterie of scholars, Jerome Roche (England), Linda Maria Koldau (Germany), Metoda Kokole (Slovenia) and Gianluca Viglizzo (Italy), both the biography and music of this fascinating composer of the mid-17th century are at long last coming to light. I am especially grateful to Gianluca Viglizzo for sharing with me his as-yet-unpublished article on Rigatti containing new biographical data. Much of the information below is derived from this article and an earlier one by the late Jerome Roche.
Baptized on October 15, 1613 in ...
