Francesca Caccini News
Italian composer
- lute, voice
- soprano
- opera
- Grand Duchy of Tuscany
- composer, poet, lutenist, writer, opera singer, music teacher, actor
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2024-04-21
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2024-04-06 08:42:00
Spell Book, Witch & Stone Fruit: composer Freya Waley-Cohen on the power of ritual and spells
[…] surrounded by witches or was one. She met up with Rebecca Tamás to chat and share ideas, and then Freya embarked on writing the song-cycle Spell Book, something that kept her occupied, on and off from 2019 until now. During the same period, she worked on her opera WITCH, the two are different but linked.In 2022, Longborough Festival Opera staged the first six songs of Spell Book as part of a double bill with Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero, directed by Jennie Ogilvie with the festival's emerging artists and the instrumental ensemble Chroma. This was only half the music, and the order was very different to the completed work that premiered in February 2024; seeing Spell Book at Longborough spurred Freya on to complete the work.She thinks of the song-cycle Spell Book as a dramatic concert work, so it can be staged but this adds another layer of someone […]
2023-12-08 08:53:00
An Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, Italian and a German find themselves on a desert island: Bampton Classical Opera explores Alcina's Island
[…] of Ariosto angered the Queen and he was banished from court until he had finished the complete translation, which was published in 1591. In 1596 he published at political allegory, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax which included a description of the flushing toilet. The title was a pun, Ajax being a 'jakes', the slang word for toilet.One of the earliest surviving operas based on Orlando Furioso is Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina from 1625. Francesca Caccini's only surviving opera, the premiere in Florence also featured a horse ballet though alas modern performances of the opera have not attempted to include this. It was staged in 2015 by BREMF [see my review]. Caccini's opera treats the subject quite lightly, and it is clear that Ariosto's characters were regarded as entertainment, with a moral perhaps, but definitely something to be enjoyed and […]
2023-10-27 06:30:00
A bold statement of cultural synthesis: Vache Baroque's Jonathan Darbourne on celebrating the art of Salmone Rossi
[…] dancers from BirdGang Ltd and choreographed by the dancer-actor Ukweli Roach. [watch FAREWELLS on YouTube]To place Rossi within his musical and cultural world, we are now in the middle of a series of performances being given in London synagogues [11 November 2023, further details] and in the hall of The Vache house [4 November 2023, further details]. These programmes place the sacred and secular vocal music by Rossi alongside pieces by contemporaries such as Monteverdi, Caccini, Byrd, Weelkes, Campion, and Kapsberger. Madrigals, solo songs, motets, metrical psalm settings, and a handful of settings from ‘The Songs of Solomon’ attest to a highly diverse and experimental musical climate - what we like to view now as a shift from Renaissance rules to Baroque rule breaking.To finish the year, the acclaimed ensemble La Vaghezza will join eight singers and two instrumentalists from Vache Baroque at St John's Smith Square [13 December 2023, further […]
2023-10-16 13:50:53
Short Notes I, October 2023
[…] many years he had served at the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, son of Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Ferrara. After the cardinal’s death, Marenzio found employment with Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and later, with Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. We can assume that while in Florence, he met the three Florentine composers whose lives we had followed closely in our recent posts – Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, and Emilio de' Cavalieri, but while he inhabited the same intellectual circles as the three, Marenzio never got interested in their ideas about monody and opera. He did, nevertheless, write music for two out of six intermedi to the play La Pellegrina, composed for the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando to Christina of Lorraine in 1589 (Cavalieri oversaw the production and composed one of the intermedi, Caccini composed another one, Peri […]
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