The 2023 Season of Musikàmera continues with the concert by the Belgian ensemble Scherzi musicale, a reference ensemble in the world of early music for over fifteen years, especially for its work on the repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries. The ensemble brings together 3 to 40 musicians around its founder and director, Nicolas Achten – one of the few singers who accompany themselves with lute, theorbo, harp and harpsichord – and for this Venetian performance it is formed by Achten himself (baritone, chitarrone , double harp, harpsichord), by soprano Wei-Lian Huang, by Lies Wyers on liron and François Dambois on lute and guitar. The evening’s programme, entitled Labirinto d’amore, includes the performance of some chamber arias from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by important Italian composers, such as Giulio Caccini and his two daughters Settimia and Francesca, Giovanni Felice Sances and, above all, Claudio Monteverdi, the most brilliant composer of the Italian seventeenth century. The most conflicting feelings of love are intertwined in a “labyrinth of love”. The golden age of the madrigal, the highest and most important genre in which music and poetry are totally intertwined, covers about a century of music history, starting from 1520 and first in Tuscany, then gradually extending throughout the peninsula at the time, with a central point in Venice above all because of the extraordinary history of music publishing which originated and then developed in the lagoon city. It was not a straightforward and unique story, but rather rich and varied, so much so that in its ending it opened up to the monodic genre – the “recitar cantando” – which subsequently supplanted it: and, naturally, the same interpreters of a genre also turned out to be strong protagonists of the next one.
