Event Details
Tue, May 24, 2022
20:30 – 22:00
LIMONAIA
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Firenze, Italia
RSVP: lapietra.reply@nyu.edu
The voice of Ariadne lamenting on the shore of Naxos has been an obsessive presence in poetry and music since Catullus and Ovid attempted to record it in their works. Through musical reenactments, Ariadne’s voice has been resonating across time and space. Key to the diffraction of her lament has been – and still is – the echo produced by the many voices that, over the centuries, have kept it alive. Apparently lost once they are uttered, these voices perpetuate their presence by being echoed through other voices, which join a never-ending chain of performative memory. Ariadne’s Echo is a musical exploration of the ways in which Ariadne’s voice came back to life in early modern Italy and haunted vocal music ever since.
Ariadne’s Echo retells the story of the abandoned heroine through a selection of poetry and vocal music from the Baroque age that, after centuries of silence, are returned to their ephemeral matter: voice. The program draws on the corpus of previously unpublished manuscript materials that are at the core of Eugenio Refini’s current book project, Ariadne’s Echo: Voice, Memory and the Performance of Reception. The pieces are Baroque cantatas for soprano and continuo. The event, which stems from the collaboration of Prof. Eugenio Refini with musicologist Davide Daolmi and early music specialist Andres Locatelli, artistic director of the ensemble Theatro dei Cervelli, is part of a longer-term project that will include a recording and further concert programs.
The concert will feature a selection of baroque cantatas that relate to the myth of Ariadne. This musical journey includes vocal works by Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Giacomo Carissimi, and Marco Marazzoli, as well as instrumental music from the period.
The concert will include a conversation on the project between the scholar Prof. Eugenio Refini, Department of Italian Studies at New York University, Prof. Davide Daolmi, Associate Professor of Music History and History of Music Theory at the University of Milan, and Larry Wolff, Co-Director, NYU Florence.
Featured Biographies
Theatro dei Cervelli
ENSEMBRE
Theatro dei Cervelli (Theatre of the Brains!) is a recently created ensemble devoted to Renaissance and Early Baroque Italian music directed by musician and musicologist Andres Locatelli. It reunites singers and instrumentalists of international provenance that share the same passion for the rediscovery of Italian sacred and secular music from ca. 1500-1650. Our mission is to explore the interaction between thought, music and emotion from a historical perspective and through a careful study of historical performance, theory, and musical/textual traditions.The ensemble’s name is borrowed from Italian humanist Tommaso Garzoni (1549-1589), whose treatise Theatro de’ vari e diversi cervelli mondani (1583) is one of the most curious early-modern attempts to describe and categorize the human mind and all the different personalities (called cervelli, cervellini, cervellazzi, etc.).
Roberta Mameli
SOPRANO
Roberta Mameli is currently considered one of the spearheads in the Baroque repertoire for her versatility and crystalline voice, as well as for her great interpretative and acting qualities. Roberta is a regular guest of the most important Opera Theaters and Music Halls with conductors such as C. Hogwood, J. Savall, D. Callegari, F. M. Sardelli, A. Curtis, D. Fasolis, L. G. Alarcón, J. Tate, C. Abbado and M. Armiliato. She won the prestigious Diapason d’Or 2017 for her Solo Album Anime Amanti, and Teodora by M.Montalbetti was awarded as best execution and opera of 2021. She recorded for several labels, including Brilliant Classic, Dynamic, Glossa, Näive, Sony, and Alpha.
Andrés Locatelli
RECORDER
Andrés Locatelli is an Italian-Argentinean musician and musicologist based in Switzerland. As a recorder player, he has collaborated extensively with celebrated early music orchestras and ensembles across Europe: Il Pomo d’oro, Les Musiciens du Louvre, La Venexiana, Musica Temprana, Concerto Italiano (Rinaldo Alessandrini), among others. With these ensembles he has recorded for the labels Pentatone, Naïve and Cobra Records. As conductor and musical director, Andrés is particularly interested in sacred and secular polyphonic music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, 17th-century opera, and experimental interdisciplinary projects based on early music. In the field of musicology, Andrés’s interests span from the Late Middle Ages to the Baroque Era, with a strong attention to the dialogue between different disciplines. Andrés’s research has been funded by the University of Pavia, the City of Cremona, and the Giorgio Cini Foundation of Venice. He was VSRC at Princeton University in 2019-
Hermann Schreiner
CELLIST
Hermann Schreiner was born in 1993 in Villa Allende, Córdoba, Argentina. Hermann studied modern and baroque cello with Cristian Montes, Marcelo Montes, Pablo Romero, Phoebe Carrai, and Viola de Hoog. He has performed in theatres and halls in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brasil, Colombia, Peru, the United States, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands. He is principal cellist at the Stable Orchestra of the Argentine Theatre, and currently studies early music at the Amsterdam Conservatorium.
Julio Caballero Pérez
HARPSICHORD
Julio Caballero Pérez was born in Granada. In 2013 he began his studies at the Musikhochschule Bern with Dirk Börner and in 2015 he moved to the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where he continued his training with Jesper Christensen, Francesco Corti, and Jörg-Andreas Bötticher. Julio has played in orchestras such as Les Musiciens du Louvre, Il Pomo d’Oro, B’Rock Orchestra, Orchestre du Théâtre de La Monnaie (Brussels), among others. During the 2016-2017 season he was the harpsichordist of the European Union Baroque Orchestra (EUBO). He is the artistic director and harpsichordist of “El Gran Teatro del Mundo”, winner of the Early Music Prize at the York International Early Music Competition, and part of the EEEmerging program. With his ensemble, he has performed in many important halls and festivals across Europe. Their first album “Die Lullisten – Lully’s followers in Germany” has received the Diapason d’Or.
Eugenio Refini
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN STUDIES, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Eugenio Refini (PhD Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Italian Studies at NYU. His research focuses on reception, translation, and forms of adaptation, which he explores through the intersections of rhetoric, poetics, drama, music and voice studies. The author of numerous publications, including monographs, book chapters, and journal articles, Dr. Refini has been awarded fellowships from Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, the Bodleian Library, the Warburg Institute, among others. He is the recipient of the NEH Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome (2021–2022).
Davide Daolmi
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MUSIC HISTORY AND THEORY, UNIVERSITY OF MILAN
Davide Daolmi (PhD University of Rome La Sapienza and Diploma in Composition, Conservatorio “G. Verdi”, Milan) is an Associate Professor of Music History and History of Music Theory at the University of Milan. He is a specialist of medieval and early music, with publications on early opera in Milan and Rome, as well as critical editions such as Francesco Cavalli’s Orione. He is also the curator of the critical edition of Gioachino Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle and the author of monographs on Nicola Vicentino, Franchino Gaffurio, the secular songs of the troubadours, and Mondadori’s recent Storia della musica dalle origini al Seicento.
Larry Wolff
JULIUS SILVER PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT NYU AND CO-DIRECTOR OF NYU FLORENCE
Larry Wolff is Julius Silver Professor of History at NYU and Co-Director of NYU Florence. His books include Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001), Paolina’