![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soundslikesydney.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Love-In-Venice-Hi-Res_w-Roland-Vertical-Close1-325x216.jpg\" "\\"Love")
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The Song Company Love in Venice <\/em><\/p>\n The City Recital Hall, Sydney<\/p>\n Wednesday March 14th 2012<\/p>\n The contemporary relevance of 16th century European music is ever real.\u00a0 Roland Peelman, Artistic Director of The Song Company proved this when he\u00a0chose\u00a09 madrigals composed between 1603 and 1619,\u00a0from Claudio\u00a0Monteverdi’s vast oeuvre, <\/em>and paired them with the highly theatrical madrigal opera Barca de Venetia per Padova <\/em>by Adriano Banchieri\u00a0 for his troupe\u00a0to perform with Tommie Andersson (theorbo\/guitar)\u00a0and Laura Vaughan (lirone\/viol).<\/p>\n He\u00a0also proved\u00a0that\u00a0serious music doesn’t have to be po-faced\u00a0and dour; its performance can be burlesque\u00a0and satirical; it can entertain and engage\u00a0without drawing on\u00a0voyeurism or crushingly concrete references to contemporary society.<\/p>\n The Monteverdi madrigals with text by various poets, amongst them Petrarca, Marino and Guarini, took up the first part of\u00a0Love in Venice<\/em>. The audience was\u00a0clearly delighted. Anti-phonal effects were intensified with sopranos Susannah Lawergren and Anna Fraser singing the first madrigal from either end of the rest of the\u00a0ensemble which comprised mezzo-soprano Lanneke Jones, tenor Richard Black, baritone Mark Donnelly and bass Clive Birch. Other configurations were\u00a0adopted through out, enhancing\u00a0the vocal part writing and\u00a0balance, most effectively with Lawergren singing a wistful Oim\u00e8 il bel viso <\/em>from the top gallery with the rest of the ensemble below.<\/p>\n The musicians took the audience from cerebral\u00a0love through to breathless expressions of fulfilment.\u00a0I for one, was left with a yearning to be on a gondola on a romantic backwater in La Serenissima.<\/em><\/p>\n The second part of the concert involved an aquatic journey of a different kind. A few simple props transformed the singers into\u00a0an assortment of characters from the commedia dell’<\/em> arte<\/em>,\u00a0who find themselves having to fraternise together\u00a0on a boat as they journey from Venice to Padua.\u00a0They are caricatures of everyday people thrown together by a common\u00a0purpose and sharing a common fate, rather like the\u00a0omnium-gatherum<\/em> in an Agatha Christie\u00a0mystery or Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel The Cat’s Table. <\/em>However, in Barca<\/em> nobody dies. This group is about embracing love and life and the singers seem to relish it.\u00a0There is flirtation aplenty as they moved about the stage, food and wine, and even the penniless wounded soldier returning from the wars is given short shrift.<\/p>\n Roland Peelman’s unobtrusive direction from the harpsichord was meticulous as always. Even he took on a\u00a0role and had the rare\u00a0opportunity to to wince visibly as his singers sang\u00a0their characters. It was a thrill to see the rare\u00a0lirone\u00a0and to\u00a0hear early music experts Tommie Andersson and Laura Vaughan perform.<\/p>\n The madrigals were sung in Italian, with intervening narrative spoken by the singers\u00a0in English. The alternation between the two languages was seamless.\u00a0The ornamentation was especially important as a marker of a historically informed performance. It fleshed out the texture of the writing, added drama\u00a0and beautified the words and their meaning. As a device Monteverdi’s ornamentation was part of his statement\u00a0adopting the seconda prattica <\/em>using dissonance and ornaments to create effect and opening the doors to new means of expression in music.<\/p>\n This was an elegant\u00a0presentation and the audience loved it.<\/p>\n Shamistha de Soysa for SoundsLikeSydney<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Song Company Love in Venice The City Recital Hall, Sydney Wednesday March 14th 2012 The contemporary relevance of 16th century…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"sls_format":[],"class_list":["post-6856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"acf":{"deck":"","is_featured":false,"media_type":"standard","audio_embed":"","video_url":""},"yoast_head":"\n