By Jerry Fuller
World Class Performances of Early Music.
Born in Northern Italy, Maria Xaveria Peruchona (ca. 1652-after 1709) joined the Collegio di Sant’Orsola, a religious convent for women, in 1668. Contemporary accounts indicated that Peruchona was a fine singer and organist, and she no doubt studied with Isabella...
Hailing from Verona, Evaristo Felice dall’Abaco was a baroque violinist and composer. Born in 1675 to a skilled guitarist, dall’Abaco received some of the best musical training available, and may even have been a student of Giuseppi Torelli. He spent...
Based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo has come down through history as one of the earliest operas to employ the full resources of the orchestra. Monteverdi’s use of polyphony, and especially his innovative orchestration,...
Jacquet de la Guerre Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is best remembered as the first French woman to write an opera (Cephale et Procris in 1694). She was born into a family of musicians and performed upon the harpsichord for...
Working and living almost exclusively in early-eighteenth century Paris, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault was primarily an organist. While employed in the Parisian churches of Grands-Augustins and Saint-Sulpice, he honed his skills as a composer. While Clérambault was organist and choir director at...
Thomas Tallis was truly a Tudor composer. With a life that spanned most of the sixteenth century, Tallis served the royal court under Henry VIII, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Under Elizabeth, Tallis, along with William Byrd, was granted a...
Most of the information that we have regarding Giovanni Battista Fontana comes from the preface of a posthumously published collection of his compositions. Published in 1641, eleven years after his death from the plague, Fontana’s lone collection consisted of sonatas...
During Antonio Vivaldi’s extended tenure at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, he composed two settings of the Gloria (he is rumored to have written a third Gloria, but this setting has been lost). These two sacred works were virtually forgotten...
Nicolas Bernier was an Italian-influenced French composer of motets and cantatas who lived from 1664 until 1734. Bernier is a lesser-known composer of the French baroque, who belonged to the generation that came between Lully and Rameau. Although he spent...
By the late 17th century, the term “consort music” had given way to such now familiar terms as concert, concerto, and sonata. For the century prior, and especially in the Jacobean era, consort music was extraordinarily popular in England. It...
Probably the greatest Spanish Renaissance composer, Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in Avila in 1548. He began his musical career as a choirboy at Avila Cathedral and by 1565 was enrolled as a singer at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico in...
