The year Beethoven died, 1827, was also the year that his last five quartets appeared in print. His enigmatic legacy did not go unnoticed by young Mendelssohn, whose Quartet no. 2 shows Beethoven’s influence in the Lied-like quality of its first movement, and especially in its cyclic form and complex variation principle. These are the very features that make up the impressionistic harmonic and timbric texture of Debussy’s Op.10, and that, in the different atmosphere of the mid-XX-century, resurface in Ligeti’s Metamorphoses—“nocturnal”, intimate, private, and safe from the restrictions by the Budapest regime. So, if what the young virtuosos of the Chaos String Quartet share is a desire to “explore extremes and welcome the unpredictable”, who, better than them, could make life sprout from the seeds of a “future” sown almost two centuries ago?

The Programme

“Josquin, don’t say the heavens are cruel and merciless, that gave you genius so sublime”: this is what Serafino Aquilano wrote to Josquin Desprez, his fellow musician at the Sforza court. And indeed, the genius of the Burgundian composer, the greatest innovator of sacred polyphony, is still greatly admired. His fame especially grew after the development of music printing in Italy, where he spent much of his career: in 1484 he was in Milan, then at the Pope’s court until 1499, and finally, after a short period in France, in the service of Duke Ercole I d’Este in Ferrara. The Missa Ave Maris Stella, based on the homonymous Gregorian hymn, probably dates back to his Roman period, and paves the way for the ecstatic contemplation of the divine that culminated in the motet Mirabilia testimonia(Psalm 118).

The Programme

Sapphires, emeralds, garnets, pearls, amethysts, rubies and agates, topazes: these beautiful gems were looted in the East during the Fourth Crusade (1204) and brought back to Venice, where they are now set in the famous Pala d’oro in Saint Mark’s basilica. The altarpiece, first commissioned in the X century by the Doge of the Serenissima from the best goldsmiths in Constantinople, was only completed four centuries later. Inspired by it, Marco Gemmani selected polyphonic music of the Venetian school to “match” with its enamels plaques depicting scenes from the Old Testament and the lives of Christ and St Mark. Pictures of these enamel plaques will be projected during the performance to match the polyphonic architectures in unrivalled splendour.

The Programme

Since the last century, our auditory memory of XIX-century symphonies has become consolidated on the performative tradition of large orchestras using standardized instruments, features and timbres. This is a “habit” that Accademia Bizantina has always avoided, not only for the Baroque repertoire: see for example the two Romantic symphonies they propose in historically-informed performance style, on period instruments. Mendelssohn’s Italian will sound “different”—a tribute to Italian cantability incorporating figurations from saltarello, but mindful of Bach’s counterpoint and infused with the Vienna spirit. And the Rhenish will resonate with a surprisingly rich tonal palette, enhancing Schumann’s thematic elaboration and renewal of the great traditional form.

The Programme

O Oriens is one of the Advent antiphons, also called “O antiphons” because their titles begin with the vocative particle “O”. Many of them, intoned polyphonically as motets, originated in the Eastern Mediterranean and reached us through the XV-century Cyprus manuscript, now preserved in Turin. The codex includes anonymous music in the tradition of Ars Nova, since, before the Venetian conquest in 1489, Cyprus was ruled by the French Lusignan family. The concert comes in the form of an imaginary dialogue between the anonymous Cypriot composers and Matteo Da Perugia, the first magister cappellae of the Milan Cathedral, whose work is also found in a unique source, the Modena manuscript, probably assembled in the early XV century, at the same time when oriental scribes were writing down the motets of the French-Cypriot court.

The Programme