C. Monteverdi
Maria Vesper
Collaboration with Concerto Copenhagen
Lars Ulrik Mortensen, artistic director
Claudio Monteverdi was at his best age, 43 years old, and increasingly stuck after 22 years as a court composer of the immensely wealthy but rather isolated gregarious Gonzaga family, in the mosquito-ravaged Mantua. In 1610, three years after the opera Orfeus, he published a huge work, a calculated demonstration of all his skills as an ecclesiastical composer. He was particularly famous for his madrigals, and opera was a whole new genre, so he hoped to attract the pope's interest and gain employment in Rome. That was not how it turned out, but Maria Vespers paved the way for the position as Maestro di Capella at the Church of St. Mark in Venice, a job he held until his death in 1643. It is the Baroque era's first ecclesiastical work, an iconic cornerstone of the epoch's music history in line with Bach's h- mole fair and Handel's Messiah. Maria Vespers consists of many parts, Monteverdi did not envision the music as one unified work, and only in our own time has it been claimed as a unified whole.
Theatre of Voices
Singers TBA