Presenting "Un petrarchino cantato", Petrarch's Canzoniere in song

Feb 03, 2022 745

Saturday, February 12 | 2:30 & 8:00 PM | First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge MA. Click here for more information. Blue Heron is a professional early music and Renaissance vocal ensemble now in its 23rd season.

Acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for its “expressive intensity,” Blue Heron is considered the finest of its kind in North America. Feel free to visit www.blueheron.org for more information. On February 12, 2022, we are presenting Un petrarchino cantato, Petrarch's Canzoniere in song.

The program is a musical valentine of 16th-century madrigals setting poetry by Petrarch. Petrarch beheld a lovely young woman, Laura, and was instantly pierced through by love at once carnal and spiritual. His love for Laura would obsess, torment, and inspire him until her death from the plague in 1348 and beyond, for the rest of Petrarch’s life, shaping his work and the very meaning of his existence. Petratch's Canzoniere reigned through centuries to ultimately inspire some of the most expressive, beautifully crafted, and emotionally powerful music of the sixteenth century.

Music by Arcadelt, Willaert, de Rore, Wert, Marenzio & others is exquisitely presented by six Blue Heron musicians, with dramatic recitation of poems and other writings in Italian by Alessandro Quarta and in English translation by Jade Guerra.

SOURCE: Italian Consulate in Boston

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