Programmes
Still Life: Early Baroque Fantasy takes its name from a paradox at the heart of seventeenth-century instrumental music: an art of the fleeting and the improvised, captured and fixed — like a still life — on the page. This was the age of the stylus fantasticus, the freest and most unbounded manner of writing, in which the composer answered to nothing but invention, rhetoric and the movement of the passions.
Música d'Outrora follows that radical expressivity across seventeenth-century Europe: the mercurial sonatas of Dario Castello and the keyboard toccatas of Gregorio Strozzi in Italy, the violinistic daring of Schmelzer, the gravity of Buxtehude, the elaborate divisions of Alfonso Ferrabosco in England and the guitar of Gaspar Sanz in Spain. Drawn through the ensemble's full continuo — organ, harpsichord, theorbo, baroque guitar, lirone and violone — it becomes a music of extremes: a sound world where time suspends, emotions intensify, and contrast itself illuminates a path towards transcendence.
95 min · with interval
— Interval —
60 min · no interval