Categoria Evento: Conferences and Seminars

Death in Venice

Johann Adolf Hasse’s last Venetian works 1773-1783

 

Director: Pedro Memelsdorff

Master classes by Vivica Genaux

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 25-29 October 2021

 

Seminar organized in collaboration with:

Johann Adolf Hasse Stiftung (Hamburg), Fondation Concordance, Irma Merk and L. + Th. La Roche Stiftung (Basel).

 

 

The autumn 2021 Early Music Seminar of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini will focus on the work of a German composer who chose Venice as his last hometown: Johann Adolf Hasse
(Bergedorf, 25 March 1699 – Venice, 23 December 1783). After a stunning musical career in Italy, Poland, England, Germany and Austria, in 1773 Hasse returned to his favourite city, Venice, and settled down in the Cannaregio neighbourhood. At his death, he was buried in the San Marcuola church next to the late Faustina Bordoni, celebrated coloratura singer whom he had married in 1730.

 

Hasse’s last compositions – including a Te Deum and a Requiem planned for his own funeral – count among the most moving ones of his entire production. The seminar will compare them with some of Hasse’s last reworkings of his own early works, such as the great Miserere settings composed in Dresden in the 1730s.

 

Main teacher will be Vivica Genaux, the most renowned specialist in the field, awarded by the Johann Adolf Hasse Foundation in Hamburg in 2019.

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Concert

28th October 2021, h. 6 pm, Auditorium “Lo Squero”

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

 

Death in Venice.

Johann Adolf Hasse, youthful compositions and Miserere in Do minor

 

Program

 

Farò ben io fra poco (da Ruggiero, 1777, atto I)

Vo disperato a morte (da Tito Vespasiano, 1738/59, atto III)

Il nocchier (da Ezio, 1755, atto I)

D’aspri legato (da I Pellegrini al Sepolcro di Nostro Signore¸ 1742)

–

Miserere, Libera me, Sicut erat in principio (dal Miserere in Do minore, Ms Dresden, SLUB, 2477.D.31c, e Bonn, ULB, Ec 82.5)

 

Singers
Camilo Delgado, tenore; Annelise Ellars, soprano; Arnaud Gluck, controtenore; Mayan Goldenfeld, soprano;
Dalma Krajnyak, contralto; Breno Quinderé, baritono; Mats Roolvink, baritono; Angelo Testori, tenore

 

Musicians
Ignacio Ramal Viejo, violin; Andrew Wong, violin; Hyngun Cho Choi, cello; Jean-Christophe Dijoux, harpsichord

 

Teacher: Vivica Genaux

Assistant: Raffaele Mellace

 

Seminars Director: Pedro Memelsdorff

 

 

2019 saw the 400th anniversary of Barbara Strozzi’s baptism. This seminar thus comes at a fitting time to reflect on the close relationship between the extraordinary singer and composer and academic and musical circles in 17th-century Venice. The event has attracted international specialists from the United States, France, Switzerland and Germany, as well as Italian musicologists, scholars and philologists. The sessions on the first day will be held in the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, while sessions on the second day will take place in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Bringing the two days to a close, Pedro Memelsdorff will give a paper on some aspects of the work of the painter Evaristo Baschenis (Bergamo, 1617-1677). He will focus in particular on a new research project concerning a series of eight Baschenis paintings with musical subjects, once owned by the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore but dispersed after the Napoleonic plundering in 1806. To end the conference on Thursday 5 March, a trio (soprano with harpsichord and theorbo) will play music by Barbara Strozzi in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (6.30 pm). The conference and concert are open to the public while seats last.

The Twinned Labyrinths seminar pays homage to the Venetian composer Antonio Caldara, a singer, violinist and cellist in the Cappella Ducale San Marco and a long-term guest in the residences of Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli, including Vignanello Castle (Viterbo), where he met some of the most distinguished musicians of the age and composed an immense  repertoire of cantatas, serenades and oratorios. Some of these pieces were performed in the courtyards and gardens of the prince, including the famous Vignanello Giardino di verdure, a kind of garden maze built by Ottavia Orsini in 1611.
The seminar will focus on instrumental chamber repertoires and the works composed during the Vignanello period, with a special emphasis on cantatas and serenades. There will be master-classes by Amandine Beyer and lectures for violinists and solo singers, with a final concert on 4 February at the Squero Auditorium. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, the seminar has been organised by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini with the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance and the Irma Merk and L. + Th. La Roche Foundations (Basel, Switzerland).

Closely related to the previous meeting held in November 2018, this seminar is addressed to solo singers of all registers of voices, especially haut-contres (high tenors) and sopranos with very agile coloratura. The scholarship holders will be guided by expert teachers and assisted by specialists of the French late Baroque and style galant repertoire. Directed by Pedro Memelsdorff, this second date with early music will be dedicated to the operatic repertoires of the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, and especially the career of the first coloured singer to play lead roles in French opera, the daughter of a freed slave whose stage name was Minette. After her theatrical debut in February 1781, Minette played lead roles in over forty productions (operas, melodramas and French comedies), thus establishing a sort of legend, but also arousing considerable social controversy, recorded by the local periodicals of the time. Among the repertoires performed by Minette are libretto settings (or their paraphrases) by writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, whose theme was racial differences and slavery, and therefore inevitably also emancipation. This detail gives the topic a special sociological interest. The highly acclaimed coloured singer was never remunerated for her performances due to her origins as a slave. She defied traditionalist criticism, however, and excited the mixed elite of her audiences who saw in her the desired but feared symbol of racial hybridisation.
Furthermore, singing and acting in comedies such as L’amant statue by Nicolas Dalayrac or Jean Martini L’amoureux de quinze ans and, especially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, gave voice to an interracial dialogue that was to greatly impress 18th-century “Haitian” audiences.

 

The seminar will end with a public concert at the Squero Auditorium on 22 February 2019 at 6.00 pm.
The programme includes arias and opera scenes by composers such as Adolphe Blaise, Johann Paul Aegidius Martini, Egidio Duni and Nicolas Dalayrac. The featured works are not revivals of the versions performed in their Parisian premières from 1770 to 1780, but the  versions sung in the theatres of Port-au-Prince, in the French-Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, by Elisabeth Ferrand, better known as Minette, the first coloured soloist in the history of opera. Her dazzling (but subsequently overlooked) career from 1781 to 1789,  revolutionized traditions and marked the history of theatre and music in America and Europe.

 

Contest Winners:
Javier Coronado, haute-contre
Maya Kherani, soprano
Maria Lueiro, soprano
Lila Powell Khazoum, soprano
Héctor dos Santos, bass
Belen Vaquero, mezzo-soprano
Benjamin Gaspon, traverso

 

Coadiuvants:
Ignacio Ramal & Guadalupe del Moral, violin
Alaia Ferrán, viola
Neven Lesage e Lucile Tessier, oboe
Alejandro Pérez, bassoon
Hyngun Cho, cello
Pablo Kornfeld, harpsichord

 

Teachers:
Vivica Genaux, mezzo-soprano
Pedro Memelsdorff, director
Lisandro Abadie, assistant

The early music seminars, directed by Pedro Memelsdorff since 2006, take place at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini twice a year in February and October, thanks to the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance, the Fondation Irma Merk and the Fondation L. + Th. La Roche (Basel, Switzerland). The October seminar is devoted to the Roman de Fauvel, a long early 14th-century satirical poem attributed to Gervais du Bus, a clerk at the court of the King Philip IV (the Fair) of France.

Based on the metaphor of an ass – Fauvel – who had become a monarch through a twist of fate, the Roman is a caustic criticism of the royal court and church and was banned for being heretical and seditious. This did nothing to diminish its popularity, however. Published around 1310-14, the Roman was almost immediately interpolated with some remarkable images and, most importantly, pieces of music composed in a variety of monophonic and polyphonic styles, including some of the most sophisticated motets of the French Ars nova, attributed to the poet, composer and diplomatic Philippe de Vitry.

The seminar will explore the complex cross-media relations between test, image and music as found in the richest interpolated version of the Roman – manuscript no. 146 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – with some of the greatest experts on the subject: Benjamin Bagby, founder and director of the celebrated medieval ensemble Sequentia, and the eminent musicologists Margaret Bent and Anna Zayaruznaya (Universities of Oxford and Yale).

On Friday, 12 October at 6pm the scholarship-holders (selected through an international call for applications), directed by Benjamin Bagby will perform in a public concert at the Auditorium “Lo Squero”

 

Inés Alonso Botella, soprano
Roberta Diamond, soprano
Ozan Karagöz, tenore
Jung Min Kim, soprano
Sylvia Leith, mezzo soprano
Laura Martínez Boj, soprano
Wolodymyr Smishkewych, tenore
Raphaële Soumagnas, soprano
Belén Vaquero Hernandez, soprano

Free entrance