EX CATHEDRA open the Baxi Early Music Season performing Monteverdi next week.
The choir, directed Jeffrey Skidmore, will joined by Silvana Scarinci and Alex Morgan on organ at Warwick’s St Mary’s Church on Tuesday (October 10).
The programme Monteverdi: In Search of 1610 celebrates the 450th anniversary of the birth of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. A contemporary of Shakespeare, he is seen as almost as influential to music as the Bard was to theatre.
Festival director Richard Phillips said: “The programme that Jeffrey Skidmore has devised stems from the publication in 1610 of a collection of sacred music by Monteverdi. It is the often revolutionary music leading up to it which principally inspires the “madrigals made spiritual”. There is also, dating from 1610, the Missa in Illo tempore, which should prove to be an exciting discovery for many in our audience.
“This was indeed an exciting time with the first opera having been composed in 1597 in Florence and Monteverdi writing his first, Orfeo in Mantua, in 1607, prior to his move to Venice in 1613.”
The Early Music Season at St Mary’s Church continues with the recorder quartet Palisander on November 7, and The York Waits giving a Christmas concert on December 12.
In the New Year, the Gesualdo Six, Joglaresa and The Bach Players complete the season.
And the Navarra String Quartet open the Investec International String Quartet Season at Leamington’s Pump Rooms on Friday October 6.
The Anglo-Dutch quartet’s programme will consist of Haydn’s Quartet in E flat Opus 9 No 2, Shostakovich’s Quartet No 5, with Schubert’s late masterpiece, the Quartet in G D887 in the second half.
The next concert in the series will be given by the acclaimed Takacs Quartet, based in the USA and led by Leamington born Edward Dusinberre.
Visit www.royalspacentreandtownhall.co.uk for tickets and further details.
