Apollo’s Fire
Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610
7:30 p.m. Friday, October 15, 2010
Schwab Auditorium
Adult $40 | University Park Student $19 | 18 and Younger $27
Apollo’s Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, returns to Penn State—after its triumphant Schwab Auditorium debut in November 2007—to perform Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin, 1610. The Vespers, based on Catholic evening prayers and featuring orchestra, soloists, and chorus, is considered the most ambitious work of religious music before the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. Apollo’s Fire, directed by conductor and harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell, has earned a national reputation for its dramatic, spontaneous, and improvisatory performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music played on period instruments. “The entire account [of Monteverdi’s Vespers] was an Apollo’s Fire triumph,” writes a reviewer for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. “Sorrell must be one of the best conductors around in this repertoire. In her hands, the glory of Monteverdi’s accomplishment couldn’t have been more radiant or moving.”
This program is made possible by a partnership among the Center for the Performing Arts and Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and School of Music.
Free public lectures about Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610
Marica Tacconi, Penn State professor of musicology, presents Expectations Overthrown: The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 from 1 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, October 12, in 112 Borland Building on the University Park campus. The lecture is as part of the Josephine Berry Weiss Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar The Shock of the New: Provocation and Challenge in European Art, Literature, and Music, ca. 1400–1650.
Apollo’s Fire Director Jeannette Sorrell and Tacconi present Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610: Meaning, Context, and Performance from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. October 15 at Esber Recital Hall in Music Building I on the University Park campus. Monteverdi’s Vespers evokes the struggle between tradition and innovation. The composer forged a new style that looked to the past while setting a new musical course. The lecture explores that tension, examines the cultural and artistic context surrounding the work, and illustrates some of the challenges performers face when presenting it four centuries later.
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Complimentary round-trip shuttle service is provided between the Eisenhower Parking Deck and Schwab Auditorium. |