Chiara Margarita Cozzolani 8 - voice Vespers of 1650 an excting alternative to the Monteverdi Vespers There can be few music lovers who have not heard the magnificent Vespers setting by Monteverdi. This work has now become a standard fare for music societies and promoters throughout the world, yet fifty years ago it was virtually unknown. Chiara Margarita Cozzolani is a composer whose work is only recently being explored, but its quality will surely lead to her ultimate recognition as the finest female composer of sacred music in the 17th century. This is lively, highly rhythmic and extremely accessable music. See reviews As a composing nun she was far from unique, but again, it is only recently that this surprisingly large repertoire of 17th ? century music is gaining the recognition it justly deserves. Musica Secreta has undertaken a series of recordings of music by nun composers beginning with the Componimenti Musicali of Lucrezia Vizzana (released in 1998). Their first disc of music by Margarita Cozzolani was released in the spring of 2001. The Vespers has been recorded by the Italian group Cappella Artemisia. In style Cozzolani?s setting borrows much from Monteverdi. It is scored for double choir and employs all the richness, expressiveness and sonority of Monteverdi?s great work. In other respects, though, the unique nature of its original performing context; a convent of nuns with no access to male performers or melodic instruments, lends it a very different colour. For practical reasons the music was published in a format that included tenor and bass voices. This was quite a standard procedure for nun composers at the time, as rules for arranging the music for female performance were clearly documented. What becomes clear is that these women could sing both very high and very low. Very often it took only the transposing of the bass parts up the octave for them to be able to perform virtually any polyphonic piece. Following the nuns? practice, Musica Secreta have transposed most of the music into a higher key and transposed up the bass parts. This should recreate something of the sonority of the convent choirs who were famous as much for their stupendous low female tenors (called bassi) as their angelic high sopranos. Between the Vesper psalms we perform smaller- scale works by Cozzolani and two other nun composers: Lucrezia Vizzana and Caterina Assandra. All of the singers have worked regularly with the leading vocal groups in the country such as The Tallis Scholars, the Consort of Musick and Gothic Voices. 10 - 12 Performers: 8 singers, organ, chitarrone, harp and bass viol
grawerowany