1624. Seventeen years after the first performance of his Orfeo, Venice was celebrating Carnival, for which Monteverdi composed the moving scene Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, a madrigal conceived as a duel of knights in a limited space and above all a plea for love… or death? This concentrated performance, described by Monteverdi himself as genere rappresentativo, is extraordinary in its expressiveness and constitutes a milestone in the history of 17th century music. Monteverdi had a narrator tell the story, since the protagonists themselves, too busy fighting, only spoke on rare occasions. He also introduced for the first time new playing techniques for the strings: pizzicati, tremolos and strappati make it possible to imitate the trampling of horses’ hooves, the rattling of sabres, the splitting of lances and the clash of helmets. In his attempt to translate rhetorical figures into music, Monteverdi used an episode from Tasso’s epic Jerusalem Delivered as a narrative and prosodic model, in which, during the First Crusade, Tancred, a Christian knight, challenges an armed man to battle. After a hard fight, he finally strikes a fatal blow. It is only when he removes the helmet from the dying warrior that he realizes that his fierce enemy is none other than Clorinda, the Saracen warrior who is his mistress. He has killed his beloved.
Since the beginning of their collaboration in Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in 2016, the myth of Orpheus has never left Rolando Villazón and Christina Pluhar and her renowned ensemble L’Arpeggiata. Together, with five of the finest baroque singers, they dare to look back on the loss of the loved one and follow the stories of the tragedy of love in every musical sense of the word. With their lively, colourful and nuanced style, they retrace for us the route and detours of the setbacks of Tancredi and the beautiful Clorinda, but also of the unhappy loves of the paradigmatic couple of L’Orfeo through the Monteverdian repertoire and that of his lesser-known contemporaries and heirs, such as Luigi Rossi, Antonio Sartorio, Lorenzo Allegri or Maurizio Cazzati.
Austrian Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata have become one of the most popular Baroque ensembles of our time, with original programmes that transcend the boundaries of the genre and are the subject of numerous award-winning recordings and widespread public interest.