Third Thursday evening Brera/Music online

For the third Musical Thursday, Brera/Musica, under the artistic direction of Clive Britton, would like to bring this online concert to your home as well.

Program

Gracieusette – chanson avec des refrain
Bonté, sen, valour et pris – ballade in stile di stantipedes
De la grand joie – ballade
Douce Amour, confortez moi – virelai
Bonne Amours me rent – ballade
Amours, cent mille mercyz – ballade
Abundance de fellonie – ballade in stile di grand chant courtois

DE DESIR ET D’ESPOIR
le amorose danze di Jehan de Lescurel
In choosing a work from the Pinacoteca di Brera for this Third Thursday of the month, we were enchanted by Francesco Albani’s Danza degli Amorini, in the section dedicated to works under restoration on the Pinacoteca’s website. For those of us who deal with early music, the parallels between restoration and historically informed performance are immediate. We, too, in some way restore the composer’s work, which most often comes to us in the form of an obviously partial written source, that is, without the sound of its original performers and therefore difficult to interpret.
In the case of today’s program, we have chosen a selection of pieces from one of our projects focused on the Parisian troubadour Jehan de Lescurel, who lived between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We received 35 monodies from him, that is, music composed of a single melody, and a polyphonic composition that indicates how the others should be performed, depending on the inventiveness of those who play and sing them. We have therefore elaborated, basing ourselves on the composition treatises of the time, what is only one of the many possible versions of these musics, which in every occasion can be performed in a different way according to the momentary feeling, to the availability of other instruments or to the pure and simple desire to create a different version “restoring” the composer’s idea of leaving the performer’s creativity free. They are all music based on dance rhythms, and all of them are dedicated to profane love themes with a playful and light character, lacking the malice typical of contemporary medieval compositions. The gyration of the putti around the tree completely recalls this cheerful sense of festivity in the garden, which we resume with the declamation of some stanzas of a poem by Jehan de Lescurel himself.

Puy de Saint-Cyr

Margherita Burattini – gothic harp
Caterina Chiarcos – voice
Andrea Gavagnin – voice, straight flute, symphonia
Davide Gazzato – percussion, straight flute

Composed of early music specialists from Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, the “Puy de Saint-Cyr” was born in the summer of 2020 inspired by the ancient brotherhoods of musicians and poets originating in northern France that spread through many cities from the mid-thirteenth century until the early eighteenth century. Members of the “puy”, men and women, would gather to make music together, challenging each other in competitions of composition, poetry and improvisation, thus constituting a refined and brilliant intellectual and artistic hub of the community. Dedicated to the performance of rare and little known pages of the medieval and renaissance repertoire, the “Puy de Saint-Cyr” aims to rediscover a careful and musically accurate historical practice, to capture the imagination of contemporary audiences and evoke a fascinating past with surprisingly bright colors. The “Puy de Saint-Cyr” has performed for the Collegium Musicum Classense in Ravenna, at the Fondazione Levi in Venice, for the Christmas concert 2020 of “Titans Rising” in Berlin, the “Concerts a Boire” of the Festival FloReMus 2021 in Florence, and has to its credit numerous concerts at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan during the evening openings of the “Third Thursday of the month” live and streaming.