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Birmingham Early Music Festival 2003
Of Love and War
Click on the red targets for further information.
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Friday 31 October
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Early Opera Company
Handel's Susanna
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Saturday 1 November
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Birmingham University Singers
Josquin Desprez Missa L'Homme Armé
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Saturday 8 November
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His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts
'Love is become a Stranger'
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Wednesday 12 November
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Catherine Bott and David Owen Norris
'Mad Songs'
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Saturday 15 November
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‘Bonds of Love and Hate’
Monteverdi's Combattimento and madrigals (book 8)
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Wednesday 19 November
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The Dufay Collective
Songs from the Crusades
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The theme this year — unfortunately topical, although planned some time ago — is War.
War, both as a reality and as a metaphor for inner struggle, has occupied poets and musicians for many centuries. Composers as diverse as the early sixteenth-century Parisian song-writer Clément Janequin and the Venetians Andrea Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi attempted to recreate in music the sounds of war, using both voices and instruments. In Monteverdi's case this resulted in one of his most famous, and finest, works, the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) and the monumental eighth book of madrigals (1638). In this book Monteverdi moved on from merely trying to imitate the sounds of war to an exploration of the warring, or agitated, emotions that exist in the minds of lovers. Here, too, Monteverdi was contributing to a long tradition of song-writing in which lovers are depicted, for example, as storming the fortress-like resistance of the beloved, or racked by warring doubts, even to the extent of being driven mad by them.
The Birmingham Early Music Festival 2003 will explore all aspects of this exciting theme, and will feature programmes ranging from the music of the Crusades (from both Christian and Muslim sides) through vocal and instrumental ‘battles’, the music of Monteverdi’s Book VIII and “Mad Songs” sung in English theatres during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As is our usual policy the concerts will be in a number of venues around Birmingham and we intend to embrace partnership events with St Chad’s Cathedral, St Philip’s Cathedral and St Alban’s Church. There will be an education project and we wish to be able to afford again to work with CEMPR, the Birmingham Schools Ensembles and students from Birmingham University and the Birmingham Conservatoire.
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