Tempera Mente @Riga Early Music Festival

In five acts through the Arcadian entanglements of love in seventeenth-century Italy. Between the Garden of Venus and Arcadia unfolds a musical journey through madrigals, canzonettas and arias by Monteverdi, Mazzocchi, Strozzi, d’India, Luzzaschi and Sances, loosely inspired by Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido.

Featuring a lovestruck shepherd, the Three Graces, a host of nymphs and shepherds, the programme leads the audience through the forests of Arcadia. Cupid lets fly his arrows in madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, a forsaken lover laments his broken heart in a deeply expressive lament by Sigismondo d’India, while the Three Graces delight in the confusions of human love. The great masters of the Italian madrigal—Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Domenico Mazzocchi, Claudio Monteverdi and Sigismondo d’India—set texts by some of the most celebrated poets of their age, including Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso and Giulio Strozzi. The result is a musical journey into the Arcadian world of the Italian early Baroque, where love is at once miracle, wound and promise.

Tempera Mente:
Janneke Stoute‍ Soprano
Iris Bouman Mezzo
Anna Bachleitner Alto
Carlos Negrín Tenor
Bas Cornelissen Bass
Riccardo Casamichiela Continuo

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