I'm thrilled that international stars such as Michala Petri, Mahan Esfahani and the
Ricercar Consort will all be taking to the stage at the spiritual home of the festival.
No longer a stumpy remnant of an act no one quite remembers, it is now a vivid
ricercar, with all the ballet's narrative and expressive motifs--life and death, prose and poetry, pageant and pas de deux--tightly interwoven, compressed, a fugue state in tutus.
In a sonnet dedicated to Rosalba Carriera and her sisters, included in her 1726 Componimenti delle pig illustri rimatrici..., Bergalli writes: Se quando avro maggior da Febo aita, Talun alzar udrammi in rime sparte I pregi, che a noi Donne il Ciel comparte Non sprezzi me, qual femminella ardita, Che senza
ricercar, qual piu fiorita Cittade ha grido in questa, o in quella parte, Tali ne mostrero, che in tele, e in carte Danno ad altri, e a lor stesse eterna vita.
Felipe Lemaigre: Barrios: Guitar (Volume I),
Ricercar 148130
Frederick the Great was enough of a musician to compose concerti for the flute and set old Bach a theme for a
ricercar in three parts; the Elizabethan noblemen who funded Shakespeare could themselves write sonnets; the wives and daughters of the Hapsburg Court in eighteenth-century Vienna could play the music of Haydn and Mozart.
Romanesque, a group new to me, bypass the Oxford manuscript altogether on Johannes Ockeghem: chansons (
Ricercar 206302 MU/750; rec 1997): Ockeghem's songs only begin to appear in manuscript sources around 1460, almost a generation after the scribe of the Oxford manuscript completed his work.
11 by having the theme sung by the player, as he also does in the
ricercar from Missa della Madonna (Fiori musicali, 1635), where re-fa-fa-mi-la-re yields 'Ferrara, li mia fe'.
Pavel Kopecky:
Ricercar for Organ Solo, Karel Janovicky: Sonata for Cello and Piano, Jan Kasal: Schooling, A Door (world premieres).
Harmonie Universelle from Germany, the
Ricercar Consort from Belgium, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the oboist Nicholas Daniel all make Wales or festival debuts.
Gordon-Seifert herself recommends Airs a deux parties, on which Stephen Stubbs and Stephan van Dyck perform airs by Joseph Chabanceau de la Barre (
Ricercar 233352, 2000).