IV International Music Festival
La Renaissance
Alta Capella early music ensemble and others…
May-June of 2014 Moscow will witness the IVth International Music Festival La Renaissance which has already become a traditional event in the capital’s cultural life and has taken a liking of all lovers of old music. The Festival will enjoy the support of the Moscow State P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatoire, the French Institute in Russia, the Embassy of the Azerbaijan Republic in the Russian Federation. The organizer of the Festival is the Alta Capella (artistic director Ivan Velikanov) – the first and until now the only ensemble of early brass wind instruments in Russia – consisting of the Moscow Conservatoire graduates, students and post-graduates.
Within the Festival’s framework the Second scientific-practical conference «Musical Iconografhy: Culture of the West and Culture of the East» (May 13-14) will take place. It is organized by the Scientific Research-Methodological Centre of Historical Musicology at the Conservatoire’s Chair of Foreign Music History (headed by prof. M.A. Saponov, Dr. of Arts). The conference’s practical part will be made up of lectures, master-classes and joint concerts of well-known masters in early music, Alta Capella musicians and students participating in master-classes.
The La Renaissance-2014 Festival concerts will be held in the Conservatoire’s Maly Hall and Conference-Hall, in the Evangelical-Lutheran Stt. Peter and Paul’s Cathedral in Moscow. Among participants are musicians from France: Jean-Pierre Pinet, professor in traverse-flute at the Gabriel Piern? Conservatoire in Metz and at the Darius Milhaud Conservatoire in Aix-en-Provence, musical director of Stravinsky Ensemble, and Jean-Fron?ois Novelli, a wonderful tenor specializing in vocal baroque repertoire.
The central event will present the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Vespro della Beata Vergine; 1610) by C. Monteverdi, one of the most important and world-famed compositions in the pre-Bach history of music, to be performed for the first time in Russia. Soloists from France, Germany, Columbia and Lithuania will participate in the concert. The project is headed by Andrew Lawrence-King (Great Britain), professor in early harp at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, professor in early harp and continuo at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, artistic director of the Harp Consort Ensemble.
Andrew Lawrence-King and Alta Capella musicians have already accumulated a rather sufficient experience of joint work: concerts in memory of Montserrat Figueras (January 2012) and «Shakespeare’s Musicke» (June 2013) successfully presented at the Conservatoire’s Rakhmaninov and Maly Halls; participation in the Open Academies of Baroque Music in St. Petersburg – the programme «Music from the first in history operas and oratorios» (including G. Carissimi’s oratorio «Jephte»; September 2012), the stage production of S. Landi’s opera «La Morte d’Orfeo» (December 2013); the production of «La Rappresentazione di Anima е di Corpo» by E. Cavalieri (Moscow, N.I. Satz Children’s Musical Theatre) which won a prestigious theatrical award – the Golden Mask-2013 juri’s special prize.
