Touring

Musica da Camera tours its concerts to local towns like Cooma or Gunning. Allegri was a Munich band touring to Venice. Only in Europe! You see lots of people with instrument cases on public transport in Europe. I’d noticed one woman when we shared a waiting room in Munich, then seen her walking to the same train in Munich then exited the train into a theorbo case in Venice and this was her group. We were obviously meant to hear them so we did. They were Allegri, Ensemble für Alte Musik München; they were playing Himmel und Erde – Cielo e terra, sacred and profane music of the 1600s; they were five period instrumentalists with five vocalists; their venue was the Chiesa Luterana di Campo Ss. Apostoli (just tangentially, fronting a Titian and a Cronach). This was a lovely outing, I understood little of the words but the music was evident. Buxtehude and Monteverdi but also Schein and Schütz and von Plawenn and Landi, Pez and Rosenmüller. Several names I didn’t know but all dignified with soft tones of gut and harpsichord and theorbo and occasional recorder and those harmonies from five or variously smaller numbers of voices. One work was instrumental: Pez Sonata Settima. Most songs spoke of religious themes or death, as that era mostly did. But more than one spoke of lust or love. Some things never change. This was a lovely concert by a bunch of capable but non-professional musicians on tour. Much enjoyed and I was happy to form a relationship with their fellow if Antipodean musical tourists, MdC, with the gift of our CD. Allegri, auguri da Canberra!

Ensemble Allegri of Munich performed late Mediaeval music in Venice. Allegri comprised Kristina Maidt-Zinke and Elisabeth Röder (sopranos), Martin Witzko (tenor), Horst Mauder and Jochen Schnapka (bass), Annette Baumann and Claudia Zwenzner (violins), Katharina vom Berg (viola da gamba), Marianne Schiela (theorbo, recorder) and Dorothea Böhme-Mauder (harpsichord).