Placer y locura
Two voice and harpsichord duos come together to bring to Splendor a program about madness and pleasure, as portrayed by great seventeenth century composers from Italy and Spain. “I am madness, the one who only inspires sweetness and pleasure in this world” proclaims the anonymous Spanish text which Henri de Bailly set to music in 1614. With their singing and playing, Mariela Flores, Irene Sorozábal, Katerina Orfanoudaki and Daniel Cardiel, reflect together on how these two human experiences intersect during the Modern Era.
Sine Sole Sileo Duo
The duo Sine Sole Sileo — Irene Sorozábal (voice) and Katerina Orfanoudaki (harpsichord) — with their background in historically informed performance practice, contemporary music, and experimental concert formats are presenting an early music program around pleasure. As a duo, they explore the many different shades of pleasure as reflected in European Baroque music and reimagined through their own contemporary artistic language.
This evening they will portray pleasure as presented in music by G.Caccini, Carlo G., H.Purcell, J.Hidalgo and others, in their respective works and historical periods. These pieces were chosen both for the music they represent from Italian and Spanish 17th-century traditions and for the texts used in them, which directly or indirectly mention and express pleasure in its many forms - musically, poetically, and contextually.
The whole program of this concert is part of a broader research for the project Sweetbitter fruit in which they explore the two sided experience of pleasure from a female perspective through early and new music.
DuOneiros
Composed of Mariela Flores (voice) and Daniel Cardiel (harpsichord), both award-winning musicologists and musicians with a strong drive in the performance of Early Music, dedicates its musical performance to exploring madness in Italian and Spanish music of the first half of the 17th century.
The portrayal of madness is no secret in art: consider Francisco de Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1820-23), or the mythical mad scene in Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1819). While madness could be understood as the overflowing and exacerbation of various emotions, its origin lies, for example, in love, grief, or betrayal. This musical section focuses on the chaos experienced by their main characters, whether it’s discovering how a woman can conversate with her own thoughts in Strozzi’s Parla alli suoi pensieri or how an arrogant warrior swore to never fall in love in Monteverdi’s Ohimè ch’io cado and, to his regret, he discovers all his strength vanishes before a single glance from his beloved.
DuOneiros merges the words “duo” (duet) and “oneiros” (from the Greek “dream”), whose meaning largely captures the way these artists approach and choose their repertoire; allowing imagination, thoughts, emotions, and stories to come alive through music and, perhaps for a moment, allowing listeners to release earthly reality and dream...
Pictures:
Sine Sole Sileo Duo - by Rafael Descanes
DuOneiros - by Gijs van Woudenberg
