Vivaldi's famous Gloria
With his Venice Baroque Orchestra and La Cetra from Basel, baroque specialist Andrea Marcon has been bringing predominantly Italian baroque music to Amsterdam for nearly twenty years. This program opens with the festive Gloria by Antonio Vivaldi, one of the numerous works this Venetian wrote for the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls where music was performed at a high level.
Spectacular polyphony
La Cetra presents Georg Muffat's glorious 24-voice Missa in labore requies . Muffat, born to Scottish ancestors in the French Duchy of Savoy, considered himself a German composer and pursued a career in the Habsburg Empire. Through his music, he brought elements of the French and Italian Baroque to Vienna and Salzburg. Muffat hoped to promote peace between peoples with his blending of styles. In Salzburg, he was in the service of the Archbishop. Salzburg Cathedral lent itself perfectly to the rich polyphony that flourished in Venice in the sixteenth century. For this concert, Andrea Marcon arranges his musicians in multiple groups to allow the immense proportions and echo effect of this Baroque Mass to resonate optimally.