La Renaissance 2012


II International Festival of Music and Dance
La RENAISSANCE

Themes and Variations
Alta Capella early wind instruments ensemble and others…

The Festival will take place in Moscow in January – February of 2012. The organizers of the Festival are the Alta Capella early wind instruments ensemble and the Moscow State P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatoire with the assistance of the French Institute in Russia (Institut fran?ais de Russie), the Italian Institute of Culture in Moscow (Istituto Italiano di Cultura a Mosca), the Cervantes Institute in Moscow (Instituto Cervantes de Mosc?). The first La Renaissance Festival was conducted in April of 2011 with great success.

In our country we are witnessing a rapid growth of interest in early music, since it is quite natural for present-day people to seek some kinds of contacts with creations of former ages. To accomplish this is possible resorting to instruments for which this music was created. Many of them, with their peculiar manner of playing caused in most cases by their structure and their potentialities, have no whatsoever contemporary analogues. For instance, zink – consonant to a human voice in sound – which was highly popular at the epoch of the Renaissance and Early Baroque but quite out of use toward the 18th century. The same is true of organ-portativ which we saw in Fra Beato Angelico frescoes and Hans Memling’s pictures, in many medieval miniatures and stained-glass windows in cathedrals – not a single instrument has survived (present-day portatives being reproductions) whereas to achieve dynamic nuances is only possibly when playing such a manual organ.
The Festival concert programme covers all kinds of music, from the High Middle Ages up to Early Baroque. Included are dances from Florence at the time of Botticelli, 14th-15th century works played on medieval key instruments (organetto), as well as vocal and instrumental music of 16th-17th centuries. Many compositions will be performed for the first time in Russia. In joint concerts of foreign masters with the Alta Capella Ensemble to be conducted in several places (Rakhmaninov Hall of Moscow Conservatoire, Italian Atrium of A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, «Na Kislovke» concert-hall) Time of Dance Ensemble directed by Natalia Kaidanovskaya will take part, as well as professors, students and post-graduatesof the Moscow Conservatoire (Faculty of Historical and Contemporary Performance, Orchestral Faculty, Faculty of History and Theory of Music).
As an essential component La Renaissance Festival includes master-classes and lectures of famous musicians from Italy, France and Spain. These performers – while covering a broad range of themes, i.e. early instruments and their use in composition and verbal musical traditions, the art of improvisation in solo and ensemble-playing, will share their experience in arrangement, reconstruction and interpretation of early music texts.
Among participants of the 2012 Festival are V?ronique Daniels, France, a choreograph, dancer and expert in medieval dance; William Dongois, France, a legendary cornet-player and improvisator; Stefan Leg?e, France, a trombone-virtuoso; Isacco Colombo, Italy, a multi-instrumentalist (recorders, shawms, tabor-pipe, bagpipes); such unique performers as Guillermo P?rez, Spain (medieval organ-portativ) and Andrew Lawrence-King, Great Britain (early harps).