Conversazioni: The Birth of Expression in Italy

The Italian Baroque began with a daring idea: music should do more than please the ear. It should move the heart. Oklahoma Baroque Orchestra follows that idea from the first breath of spring to the last wound of love.

We begin with Monteverdi’s Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti, a west wind returning over a dancing bass line, and with Caccini’s Amarilli mia bella, the plea of a lover willing to open his chest to prove his devotion. Between them, the violins learn to sing without words. Buonamente’s Sonata a 2 Violini e Basso, Legrenzi’s Sonata “La Cetra,” named for the lyre, and Marini’s restless Sonata IV show how quickly the instruments took up the voice’s new freedom.

Then the voices return in earnest. Barbara Strozzi, one of Venice’s most gifted composer-singers, gives us L’Eraclito amoroso, the weeping philosopher recast as a lover who cannot stop crying. The evening closes with Sances’s Vulnerasti cor meum, a Song of Songs setting where sacred devotion and earthly longing become hard to tell apart.

A returning wind, a pleading lover, a wounded heart—three ways the seventeenth century learned to sing what it felt. Join us as Oklahoma Baroque Orchestra follows the passions from Mantua to Venice to Vienna.

Claudio Monteverdi  (1567–1643)

Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti

Giovanni Battista Buonamente  (c. 1595–1642)

Sonata a 2 Violini e Basso

Giulio Caccini  (1551–1618)

Amarilli mia bella

Giovanni Legrenzi  (1626–1690)

Sonata “La Cetra”

Barbara Strozzi  (1619–1677)

L’Eraclito amoroso

Biagio Marini  (1594–1663)

Sonata IV

Giovanni Felice Sances  (c. 1600–1679)

Vulnerasti cor meum