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Madness, Revenge, and New Music: Looking for the Lost Finale of ‘L’Orfeo’

This week, Seattle-based Pacific MusicWorks, for their upcoming season finale (May 20 and 21), will give the world premiere of a new musical completion of the finale scene that appeared at the end of the originally published libretto for Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Combining sung and danced performance, this alternate ending is the work of Stephen Stubbs, the lutenist, conductor, and the founder and artistic director of Pacific MusicWorks, with choreography by Baroque dance specialist Anna Mansbridge.

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Book Review: New Perspectives on Music and Jewish Culture in Italy

This insightful and well-researched collection of 10 essays shed light on Jewish musical activity in the Italian peninsula from the 14th to the 17th centuries. Unique to this time and place was an efflorescence of musical activity—in the sense of European “high culture”—and the authors point to the many instances of cultural, economic and social connections. There’s a focus on two phenomena: the participation by Jews in European musical culture, and the creation of new Jewish musical artifacts that resulted from a fusion of the two cultures.

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South Asian Singers Find a Home in Early Music

Sopranos Maya Kherani and Sherezade Panthaki (at right) and tenor Asitha Tennekoon are among a growing number of South Asian musicians working to promote more diversity in early-music casting and programming while building their own impressive careers. “I knew what it was like to not have role models,” says Kherani. “I thought if I could change that for one young person by being proud and open about my heritage, I should do it.”

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CD Review: Music of Early America from Three Notch’d Road

In Three Notch’d Road’s latest recording, ‘Shining Shore: Music of Early America,’ the Charlottesville group has mined the rich heritage of its own musically fertile region, presenting a fresh, inviting line-up of short songs and instrumental works that were likely heard in Virginia or its preceding colony from the late 17th-to mid-19th-centuries.

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