Early Music Festival

The Eternity
of Love

Performers
Zachary Wilder, tenor
Oleguer Aymamí, cello
Josep Maria Martí Duran, lute, guitar and conductor

Program
Works by F. Cavalli, G. Frescobaldi, C. Monteverdi, D. Obizzi, G. Kapsberger, G. Rovetta, S. de Murcia, G. Legrenzi and B. Strozzi.

Singing to love has been and continues to be a common constant in all cultures: some sing to unrequited love, others tell us the reaction to that first glance, and how it fixes on the memory and mixes it in dreams, sighs and longings for a reunion that so often will not happen; or the rejection that so many have experienced and that causes a desperation that leads to an outsized madness. In Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a movement that was dedicated to trying to squeeze human emotions to the maximum through poetry and music. They believed that the great Greek orators were capable of transmitting them like no one else and they used music to do so. This ideal revolutionized the history of music and left behind the polyphonic style, where madrigals were sung with a text in several different voices, to promote a text with a melody for a single singer and accompaniment. In Eternità d’amore there are a series of songs to love and heartbreak, to rage and contemplation, to joy and sadness, where a string of characters tell us about their adventures and misadventures that will surely resonate with all of us, since more or less has lived them.