Secret music

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the court of Ferrara became a center of musical innovation. Duke Alfonso II d’Este maintained an exclusive musical circle known as the concerto segreto. Unlike the public court concerts, these performances took place in private chambers, far from the ears of the general audience. Only a select group of confidants was admitted.

At the heart of these secret gatherings was the famous Concerto delle Donne: three exceptional singers whose virtuosity and refined expression would leave a lasting mark on European music history. Composers such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Giaches de Wert wrote sophisticated madrigals especially for them, filled with rapid coloraturas, subtle dissonances, and intimate expression.

Today, La Néréide opens the treasure chest and brings those mysterious sounds to life in Utrecht.

Artwork of the Day

With the Artwork of the Day we connect a work of art to one of the concert programmes. Sometimes the link is obvious, sometimes surprising or unexpected. Today we turn our gaze to Salvador Dalí’s surrealist Le Sommeil (1937).

In Dalí’s painting we see a gigantic, dreaming face, floating in an empty landscape, held upright by a number of fragile crutches. Little remains of the rest of the body. With this image Dalí shows how human consciousness is lost in sleep and absorbed into another reality – the subconscious. Only what happens in the mind matters there. Sleep is at once a powerful escape and deeply fragile. It is a state in which we expose ourselves to a world full of dreams and symbolism.

In antiquity this state had its own deity: Hypnos, the Greek personification and god of sleep. Hypnos was often depicted with wings, guiding people into his realm: the darkness of the night. His brother was Thanatos, death. Ever since the Greeks, there has been this double sense of sleep: as both restorative and as a foretaste of eternal rest.

This layered meaning lies at the heart of Hypnos, the programme by La Tempête, sounding today in the Jacobikerk. Under the direction of Simon-Pierre Bestion, the ensemble weaves a journey from Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony to the modern soundscapes of Arvo Pärt. Music in which the boundaries between waking and sleeping, life and death, gradually dissolve.

Where Dalí gives us the image of fragile sleep as something needing support to keep from collapsing, La Tempête translates that fragility into music. Today, however, sleep is no dark silence, but a world full of vibration and resonance.

Hifi Sessions

For many musicians, recording is crucial: it captures how you defend music at a particular moment in your artistic journey, alone or alongside kindred spirits. Recordings are often powerful statements. In a sense, they are museum pieces: they bear witness to a musical moment that once was.

Is recorded music therefore inferior to live music, ‘the real thing’? Or is that a false assumption? Festival director Xavier Vandamme will discuss these musical museum issues with three top musicians and an audio equipment designer. Together, they will tackle questions of recording, listening, and memory. With today: Christina Pluhar!

Also on the programme today...

... harpsichordist Irene Roldán, Robert Dow's Partbooks according to artist in residence Stile Antico, festive ceremonial music from 1425 by Sollazzo Ensemble, and a lot more!

Reviews

There have been wonderful reactions to the first festival weekend in various newspapers. Read the 4- and 5-star reviews of the opening weekend in NRC, de Volkskrant, and Trouw, and get up close in the Dom Tower with this report from AD Utrechts Nieuwsblad on the bell-ringing.

Today on EMTV

Today you can watch the fourth of the seven masses from the Choirbook of Margaret of Austria: Pierre de la Rue’s Missa Conceptio tua performed by Ratas del Viejo Mundo, live from the Pieterskerk. You can also watch La Flamboyance by Sollazzo Ensemble on EMTV, featuring ceremonial festive music from 1425.