ARCADIA PLAYERS
Andrus Madsen, Artistic Director
Vermeer’s “The Concert”
Music from a Missing Masterpiece
Two performances: Friday March 7 at 7:30pm; Saturday March 8 at 3pm
Warbeke Room, Pratt Hall, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
In 1990, thieves disguised as policemen stole 13 works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, including Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece, “The Concert.” It remains one of the greatest unsolved art thefts of all time: to this day, the painting has not been located.
Vermeer’s painting “The Concert,” depicting a scene of mid-17th century domestic music-making, suggests a mystery of its own: what were the musicians performing? In this program, Arcadia Players presents one response to that question, a concert of works that were popular in prosperous Dutch households in Vermeer’s time. The artist himself may have heard some of this music while working on his painting, and today’s audiences can enjoy it, too, in an intimate setting at Mount Holyoke College.
Performing are the wonderfully expressive mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux, lutenist Nathaniel Cox, Douglas Kelley, viola da gamba, and Andrus Madsen, harpsichordist and director. Madsen curated the program, examining mid 17th-century Dutch sources to find music written for the combination of musical forces depicted in the painting. The concert includes vocal and instrumental works by Luigi Rossi, Giacomo Carissimi, Johann Jakob Froberger and other notable composers whose colorful text-setting and clever harmony made them popular favorites in Dutch salons of the day.
Tickets are $35 at the door or online at arcadiaplayers.org. Seating is limited; purchasing tickets in advance is advised. We are proud to participate in Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture program by making our concerts accessible to those for whom cost is a barrier. Student/low-income tickets are $10.
Arcadia Players’ 2024-2025 concert season is made possible through the support of our patrons and donors, by our media sponsor New England Public Media, and by the Amherst and South Hadley Cultural Councils, local agencies supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
About Arcadia Players
Founded in 1989, Arcadia Players is a professional ensemble of musicians specializing in historical performance practice and dedicated to presenting music of the past in a fresh light for audiences old and new. We offer a series of concerts each year in communities around western Massachusetts and beyond, bringing together artists and audiences from throughout the region to engage listeners and showcase the work of area performers. Arcadia Players is Ensemble-in-Residence at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
