Piffaro, the Philadelphia-based Renaissance wind band considered a standard bearer for the music of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, launches its season with a collaboration with New York City’s TENET Vocal Artists and projection designer Camilla Tassi. The program marks the 650th anniversary of Francesco Petrarch’s death with a musical, visual, and literary exploration of his poetic masterpiece, the Triumphs. Petrarch, the most influential poet of the Italian Renaissance, grappled with fundamental themes of human experience – Love and Death, Fame and Time, the promise of Eternity. The program will draw upon the artists and composers inspired by Petrarch’s texts, running the gamut of 16th century Italian musical styles. Projections of text and art will transform the architecture of the historic churches hosting the concerts.
In the Triumphs, Petrarch probes his unrequited lifelong love for a woman named Laura and his deep grief at her death, of plague, in 1348. The poems’ tableaux – Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity – are reflected in the structure of the musical program, created by Piffaro band member Grant Herreid. Sopranos Madeline Healey and Clara Rottsolk embody Love and Chastity, mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland is Death, tenor Jacob Perry is Fame and bass-baritone Andrew Padgett is Time. Soprano and TENET founder and director Jolle Greenleaf gives voice to Eternity and tenor James Reese narrates the whole as the Poet.
Musical selections will illustrate the creative vitality of the Italian musical world throughout the Renaissance, from anonymous frottole and Carnival songs to works by Josquin des Prez, Bartolomeo Tromboncino, Cipriano de Rore, Emilio di Cavaliere, Cristoforo Malvezzi, and more. Piffaro’s musicians will perform on their panoply of Renaissance instruments, which includes (but is not limited to) dulcians, douçaines, shawms, recorders, sackbuts, lutes, theorbos, and percussion. There will even be a rare appearance of the hurdy-gurdy – always an audience favorite.
Support for these concerts is provided by the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation.
Projection design for Apollo’s Fire by Camilla Tassi
About Piffaro
“Widely regarded as North America’s masters of music for Renaissance wind band” (St Paul Pioneer Press), Piffaro has delighted audiences throughout the United States, Europe, Canada and South America since its founding in 1980. Under the direction of Priscilla Herreid, Piffaro recreates the rustic music of the peasantry and the elegant sounds of the official wind bands of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Its ever-expanding instrumentarium includes over 40 shawms, dulcians, sackbuts, recorders, krumhorns, bagpipes, lutes, guitars, harps, and a variety of percussion — all careful reconstructions of instruments from the period.
Piffaro and its artistic directors have been honored with Early Music America’s Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music in 2021, Early Music Brings History Alive award in 2003, the Laurette Goldberg Lifetime Achievement Award in Early Music Outreach in 2011, and the American Recorder Society’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015. In December 2016, it was one of 13 U.S. arts organizations invited to launch the new performing arts division of Google’s Cultural Institute, where it has mounted two exhibits.
https://www.piffaro.org/
Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, photo Hoffer Photography
Greg Ingles, Sian Ricketts, Héloïse Degrugillier, Priscilla Herreid, Grant Herreid, Erik Schmalz (not pictured: special guest instrumentalists Stephanie Corwin and Daniel Swenberg)
About TENET Vocal Artists
Under Artistic Director Jolle Greenleaf, TENET Vocal Artists has won acclaim for its innovative programming, virtuosic singing and command of repertoire that spans the Middle Ages to the present day.
Highlights from the past decade involve performances of all of J.S. Bach’s vocal masterworks including St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, Christmas and Easter Oratorios, Bach’s motets, and Mass in B Minor. TENET has offered multiple performances of Handel’s Messiah and has appeared on tours of Italy, Germany, and the UK. Other special projects featured Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien, a three-year cycle of Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories, a staged production of Charpentier’s Les plaisirs de Versailles, works by Purcell and his contemporaries celebrating music’s patron St. Cecilia, two surveys of medieval music, commissioned works by Reena Esmail and Caroline Shaw, and original theatrical performances highlighting works composed by, for, and about women in 17th century Italy.
Renowned for their interpretations of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, TENET Vocal Artists’ distinguished soloists have been praised for their pristine one-voice-to-a-part singing “to an uncanny degree of precision” (The Boston Globe). From 2010-2020, TENET’s highly praised Green Mountain Project gave annual performances honoring Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and other reconstructed Vespers featuring music by Monteverdi, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Giovanni Gabrieli, Antoine Charpentier, Michael Praetorius, and their contemporaries. The project’s final appearance in 2020 culminated in several concerts in Venice, Italy.
https://tenet.nyc/
