Emma Kirkby
The Golden Age Revived
Dame Emma Kirkby, soprano
Jakob Lindberg, lute
Taplin Auditorium, Princeton University
Sunday, October 4th, 7.30pm
Though admission is free, a ticket is required.
For tickets, call 1-609-258-9220
The Golden Age Revived
Every era has had its coterie of sensitive souls, nostalgic for earlier, purer and more beautiful times; some of them merely bemoaned what was lost, but others strove to revive and refashion previous cultures . Through the Renaissance a recurring fascination with Greek and Roman art, literature and philosophy informed the work of the finest artists, writers and composers. While often they turned out to be working on inaccurate information, still the results at times were wonderful – witness, for example, Monteverdi’s generation, in its search for the expressive power of Classical Greek tragedians, which resulted in the prototypes of opera in Europe – or, in a similar spirit, the search for Greek “pykna” (“points of colour”) in the chromatic madrigals of Gesualdo and his colleagues, themselves the spur for Stravinsky’s experiments four centuries later.
