Pianto Barocco

Concert of the Festival de Música Antigua de Tenerife [Tenerife Early Music Festival]

The Most Serene Republic of Venice was one of the main musical centres of the Baroque. Ottaviano Petrucci’s invention of a system to print music by means of moveable type -which he used to print Harmonice Musices Odhecaton in 1501- along with the thriving local economy that controlled most of the trade in the Mediterranean, turned this city-state into a European centre for art and, specifically, music. The growing members of the bourgeoisie and nobility liked to have small music chapels and St. Mark’s Basilica boasted enviable musician staff, which other temples strived to emulate. This is how its churches and palaces became the place for a wide range of musical genres which developed to their full splendour, from polychoral music with independent choirs at different churches to flourishing opera; from minstrels, in which musicians deployed all their virtuoso skills, to the art of the madrigal. In this programme the focus is on music written as a penitential lament. Both the tears of the virgin in Monteverdi’s Pianto della Madonna or in Canzonetta spirituale sopra alla nanna by Merula, and the suffering of Jesus Christ in the short cantata by Stradella, display a unique rhetoric. It was common in composers of the period to take resources from opera and from the great ecclesiastical genres and apply them to chamber or smaller works. This is an approach to the musical greatness of Venice from miniatures.