This year’s Moravian Autumn will draw to a close on Sunday with a gala concert featuring Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Vespers of the Virgin Mary’, complemented by work with stage and non-stage space, movement, dance, light design and other scenic effects.
“When I first heard this work performed by the La Tempête ensemble, the singer’s first notes took my breath away,” said Marie Kučerová, director of Filharmonie Brno, which organizes the festival. “Monteverdi’s opera is a spiritual masterpiece in itself, but the ensemble’s artistic director Simon-Pierre Bestion has also imbued it with French faux-bourdons from a 17th-century manuscript from southern France, and Gregorian chants in a unique performance by a solo singer. The result is a deeply spiritual, innovative opus tinged with Mediterranean exoticism.”
The French vocal-instrumental ensemble La Tempête is known for revealing the connections and influences between individual artists, cultures and eras, added Kučerová. “They are famous for their very intuitive and sensual relationship to works, the interpretation of which is appreciated by domestic and international critics. The essence of this direction leads the ensemble’s repertoire to connect a number of aesthetic directions, drawing not only from early music, but also from traditional folk repertoire and contemporary work.”
‘Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ (‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’) is one of Claudio Monteverdi’s most compositionally mature works, as well as a milestone in the history of music, whose composition arose from old traditions, while foreshadowing completely new ones. The work is a showcase of all of Monteverdi’s musical skills, a composition for one to ten voices and a rich instrumental apparatus.
“It is music that speaks to us across the time gap of almost four centuries, music that is exciting because it is the work of a brilliant artist who embodied in it not only the mastery of contrapuntal voice leadership, but above all his own deep emotional experience of sincere piety,” said musicologist Petr Slouka.
Tickets are available at Filharmonie Brno’s pre-sale, online at moravsky-podzim.cz, and at the venue half an hour before the start of the concert.
