Storie Sacre e Profane

Celebrating the vocal music of early c.17th Italy, Dunelm Consort and Players present Storie Sacre e Profane ('Stories sacred and profane') for their final project of the year.

In collaboration with soprano Emma Kirkby DBE and theorbist Jonatan Bougt, the concert will feature a variety of madrigals, solos and choruses before culminating in the astonishing 'Jephte' by Carissimi.
Involving two internationally renowned early musicians and a dozen student musicians, this concert will showcase many of the treasures of the early music repertoire and is not one to be missed.

Tickets are on sale now for a special summer price!

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Storie sacre e profane

Storie sacre e profane - ‘Stories sacred and profane’ - is a celebration of the flourishing of musical creativity, performative style and emotional expression which occurred in Italy in the early c.17th. It was a time when musical masters like Claudio Monteverdi, Girolamo Frescobaldi and Barbara Strozzi were beginning to develop the musical legacy of the Renaissance into a full, all-encompassing artistic representation of the universe and mankind within it.

Composers and performers, designers and rhetoricians all developed new styles and techniques for conveying human emotion through music, creating all-new art forms, such as the madrigal in the mid-1500s and the fully-staged opera (what Monteverdi calls Favole in Musica/‘Musical fables’) at the turn of the 17th century.

These were interwoven with the classical imagery brought back into popularity during the Renaissance. Dunelm Consort and Players exist to explore the recreation of these ideas; and where better to start than Monteverdi’s seminal Favola in musica: L’Orfeo? Based, as with all operas in the early history of the genre, on classical mythology, L’Orfeo tells the story of the legendary bard who descends into Hades for the sake of his beloved Euridice, who tragically dies on their wedding day. It was written to a libretto by Alessandro Striggio in 1607, while Monteverdi was working at the court in Mantua, and is generally considered the earliest opera to still be regularly performed. At the time of its premiere, this new form of theatrical singing shocked and delighted Monteverdi’s audience, with one court official exclaiming that “it should be most unusual, as all the actors are to sing their parts!” And the court poet at Mantua praised L’Orfeo, writing that “the music, observing due propriety, serves the poetry so well that nothing more beautiful is to be heard anywhere” - surely high praise for a man who aimed to encapsulate joy and sorrow in music. We begin with a pastoral scene, in the style of a Greek chorus, where a congregation of Thracian nymphs and shepherds invoke the god of marriage to celebrate the happy arrival of Summer, and to bless the beautiful Euridice and tragically ill-fated Orpheus on the day of their wedding.

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About Emma Kirkby DBE

Emma Kirkby feels lucky in many ways: that she met renaissance vocal polyphony while still at school, that she studied Classics and sang with the Schola Cantorum at Oxford, and, best of all, that there she encountered “historical” instruments known to Renaissance and Baroque composers - the lute, harpsichord, early piano, wind and string instruments - whose sound and human scale drew from her an instinctive response.

Beginning as a schoolteacher and amateur singer, she was soon invited to perform professionally with pioneer groups; and long partnerships followed in Britain and abroad, with ensembles, individual players, and record companies, so that now Emma’s voice and style are recognized worldwide.

Emma was awarded a DBE in 2007, and in 2011 the Queen’s Medal for Music. Amazed by all this, she is nevertheless glad of the recognition it implies, for a way of music-making that values ensemble, clarity and stillness above volume and display; above all she is delighted that her chosen field is now such an excitingly crowded area, full of new young virtuosi, happy to be soloists or team players in consorts vocal or instrumental.

About Jonatan Bougt

Award-winning Swedish guitarist and theorbist Jonatan Bougt has established himself as a distinguished musician on the international stage. He is known for his "graceful playing, stage presence that leads the listener to the music," and his "elegant and natural way of playing as well as understanding of style and musical rhetoric".

Jonatan has won several prestigious competitions, including the NORDEM EAR-ly competition (2020), the Maurizio Pratola Competition in Italy (2022), Generation SMADE in Spain (2023). Recently, he won the Royal Overseas League competition in London (2024), which will lead to his debut at the Wigmore Hall in London with Apollo’s Cabinet. He has also been awarded the 1st Prize in the Swedish Guitar & Lute Society’s Jörgen Rörby Competition (2014) and the Uppsala International Guitar Festival’s Young Talents Competition (2013). He has been selected for prestigious programs such as the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme (2018), BREMF Live! (2018/19), and Handel House Talent (2019-21) and the International Young Artist Presentation in Belgium (2023).

Jonatan is a graduate of the Royal College of Music (RCM), London, where he studied with Jakob Lindberg, Carlos Bonell, and Chris Stell, completing his Master of Historical Performance degree with Distinction in 2019 and earning a First Class Bachelor of Music (Honours) degree in 2017.