Piffaro’s 39th subscription season, the second under the artistic leadership of Priscilla Herreid, opens with a program provocatively titled The Year the Music Died. That year was 1623, when composers William Byrd, Thomas Weelkes, and Philip Rosseter all passed away within months of each other, and with them the era of Elizabethan music.
Of her selection of composers for this program, Herreid says, “most of the rest of Europe was hurtling into the Baroque period, but I love imagining these pillars of the Elizabethan style holding out until the end.”
Three singers are featured on the program: Sarah Yanovitch Vitale, soprano; Kim Leeds, mezzo-soprano; and Max Tipton, bass-baritone. Piffaro’s usual instrumental forces – Priscilla and Grant Herreid, Greg Ingles, and Erik Schmalz – will be augmented by wind players Margaret Owens, Stephanie Corwin, and Héloïse Degrugillier and Mark Rimple and Charles Weaver, two of the most agile and expressive renaissance lute players in the country.
This concert is made possible by the generous support of The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation.
