Designed and directed by Grant Herreid, the program features a narrator, loosely based on Thomas Coryat, an English seventeenth century travel writer, who, as a young man, travels throughout Europe in search of music.
Pre-Concert Lecture
On the Road with the Odcombian Legge-Stretcher: Mr. Coryat’s Musical Grand Tour
Englishman Thomas Coryat (ca.1577-1617) was not the first tourist, but he is one of the first truly engaging travel writers in the English language. His travels and musical observations provide the frame for this year’s All-Festival program.
Calmus – Faith and Madness
With a perfect blend of sound and precision, the vocal ensemble Calmus creates a program of a dialogue between sacred music masterpieces followed by madrigals that portray madness, love, war, and loneliness. Composers include Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Heinrich Schütz, Claudio Monteverdi, Carlo Gesualdo, Clément Janequin, and others.
Grand Tour Stories at the Chazen Museum of Art
Come hear stories of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers to Italy who acquired paintings for their country houses and London residences that are now in the Chazen Museum collection.
HESPERUS – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
HESPERUS creates the soundtrack for the 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre Dame with music from fourteenth and fifteenth century France. Compositions include French and Burgundian music from 1300-1500, featuring Guillaume de Machaut, Jehan l’Escurel, Guillaume Dufay, as well as lesser-known composers such as Vaillant, Morton, and Borlet.
Accompanying The Hunchback
This lecture provides some background on the making of the The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as well as a glimpse of how HESPERUS has chosen and assembled a score of French medieval music to accompany the movie.
Alchymy Viols – American at Versailles
An original ballet masque of French baroque music, dance, and drama written and choreographed by Sarah Edgar, featuring soprano, Carrie Henneman Shaw. The American on the Grand Tour encounters the exotic world of French baroque manners, dress, dance and love.
The Grand Tour From Your Theater Seat
A look at seventeenth and eighteenth-century performance works that brought the wider world to local audiences through the interaction of narrative, dance, music, costume and décor.
Dark Horse Consort – Wanderlust
Follow the misadventures of an English gentleman as he embarks on a continental Grand Tour adventure in search of love and fulfillment. Our hero’s travelogue includes springtime consort songs by Ferrabosco and Byrd, Widmann’s beguiling German dances dedicated to women, the wooing songs of the Italian gondolieri, and sultry airs espangnol.
High Culture and Low Inns
Travelers on their grand tour record many magnificent sights and sounds, and so many accounts pull from literary models provided by romances—tales of love and adventure—to frame their stories and the music that accompany them.