CANCELLED: Spanish Eloquence: "El dulce trato hablando: la música de Alonso Mudarra"

Claros y frescos ríos (Boscán)
Fantasia por el segundo tono
Si por amar, el hombre

Por ásperos caminos (Garcilaso)
Conde Claros

La vita fugge (Petrarca)
Hanc tua Penelope (Ovidio)
Dulces exuviæ (Virgilio)
Isabel, perdiste la tu faxa

--Some excerpts from IMAGINARIO: an imaginary songbook of Renaissance Spanish music.

In this performance, Maria Cristina Kiehr and Ariel Abramovitch present pieces from their recording: "El dulce trato hablando: la música de Alonso Mudarra," a monographic project around the music books of Alonso Mudarra published in Sevilla in 1546. "Tres libros de música en cifra para vihuela" is one of the most beautiful anthologies for voice and vihuela/lutes. They will pair this repertoire with a few pieces from their programme "Imaginario," a new imaginary songbook they created from surviving vihuela books and other manuscript sources from the period.

The performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience on the duo’s approach to this repertoire, the work they do as a duo and their collaboration with a philologist in historical pronunciation matters.

María Cristina Kiehr was born in Argentina, where she received her early musical training. In 1983, she came to Europe and studied under René Jacobs at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with the aim of specialising in the Baroque repertoire. She is one of today’s leading vocal artists in the field of Baroque music and has appeared throughout the world in concerts and recordings with celebrated conductors, orchestras and ensembles like René Jacobs, Jordi Savall, Philippe Herreweghe, Frans Brüggen, Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Konrad Junghänel, Concerto Vocale, La Fenice, Cantus Cölln, Ensemble Vocal Européen, Hespèrion XX, Elyma, Nederlands Kamerkoor, Concerto Köln, Ensemble 415 and others. María Cristina Kiehr is particularly interested in early Baroque music. She is a co-founder of the ensemble “La Colombina”.

Her extraordinarily rewarding collaboration with the harpsichordist and organist Jean-Marc Aymes led to the founding of the Concerto Soave ensemble, which specializes in Italian music of the early Baroque period. It has appeared at many leading festivals of early music: Utrecht, Ambronay, Pontoise, Simiane-la-Rotonde, Semaine Sainte en Arles, Montreux, Lausanne, Marseille and Paris (Cité de la Musique).

Ariel Abramovich studied lute and vihuela with Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and subsequently in France with Eugène Ferré. In 1998, he formed “El Cortesano” with counter-tenor José Hernández-Pastor to explore the Spanish vihuela repertoire, and in 2002 the duo released the first-ever album solely devoted to Valladolid vihuela composer Estevan Daça. In 2008, he began working on 16th and 17th century English lute music with tenor John Potter, and this duo became the catalyst for the Amores Pasados and Secret History recordings on ECM with Anna Maria Friman and Jacob Heringman. Their Alternative History project re-imagines renaissance polyphony as lute song (as musicians would have done in the 16th and 17th centuries) and has commissioned new music from rock musicians John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Tony Banks (Genesis) and Sting. Ariel and Jacob Heringman have also released Cifras Imagnarias, an album of intabulations for two lutes on Arcana.

In 2013, Ariel formed the duo Armonía Concertada with soprano Maria Cristina Kiehr, a project dedicated to the 16th century Iberian repertoire for voice and plucked strings. Ariel is also active as a teacher and has given masterclasses at conservatories and educational institutions all over the world, including Spain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, the US, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay.