Sweetest Nightingale, the Art of Claudio Monteverdi is the latest offering from the Northern Rivers’ renowned Vox Caldera Chamber Choir.
They will perform a concert, on Sunday in Mullumbimby, devoted to the music of the most famous composer of the Italian Renaissance.
This was a period of cultural vitality inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, when artists like Michelangelo flourished. In music too, there was a brilliant flowering – Monteverdi was a master of the madrigal, in which the voices have separate lines that interweave ingeniously.
The lyrics of these songs are witty poems all about the delights and torments of love, often with erotic allusions. The choir’s 20 voices are divided into mostly five, but as many as eight parts, as they soar and ring, magically intertwining. The pure sound of golden voices is unaccompanied except for chamber organ and cello reinforcing the bass line.
International solo soprano Gaynor Morgan joins the choir to sing some delightful duets with Vox’s own Abby Parkes, and to perform the famous ‘Lament of Ariadne’, who is abandoned by Theseus on a desert island in the mythical tale. Her distraught despair, jealous pleading and indignant rage make for a virtuosic drama of operatic intensity.
Gaynor was a soloist with Glyndebourne Opera in the UK before settling in Queensland, and she is a frequent collaborator with distinguished maestro Nicholas Routley, conductor of the choir, and formerly of the Sydney Chamber Choir and Sydney University.
The concert is at 3pm on Sunday at Mullumbimby Civic Memorial Hall.
Admission $25 / $20 at door (cash preferred)
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