Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) contributed many outstanding examples of the Italian madrigal to the repertoire. She was the daughter of one of Venice’s leading poets, Giulio Strozzi, who played a key role in the success of early opera. Giulio also nurtured his daughter’s talent by actively featuring her performances in the academies he helped to found. From that experience Barbara drew a deep understanding of musical nuance and psychology, especially the effect of performance on the listener, which she successfully transferred into her best madrigals.

Her first collection, published in 1644, utilizes 25 texts penned by her father. They are scored for anywhere from two to five voices plus continuo, and all show Strozzi’s firm grasp of the brilliant vocal style, refined through deep experience as a performer. Text expression rises above all else, and musical devices such as word painting and counterpoint are called upon when suitable to amplify the text’s message. The opening to “Priego ad amore” demonstrates the rapid changes – mainly in duple versus triple rhythm and solo versus ensemble singing – that are part and parcel of the madrigal style, ever responsive to nuances in the poetry. A case in point, audible to everyone, is Strozzi’s sagging vocal lines on morir (to die) and languir (to languish), contrasted by the surging lines at gloria. Or consider how simply she employs the five part texture (SSATB) of “Contrast of the Five Senses” to give each sense its own singer:

Soprano 1: Io miro (I see),
Soprano 2: io sento (I feel),
Alto: io gusto (I taste),
Tenor: io fiuto (I smell),
Bass: io tocco (I touch)…


Distinguished emerita from the University of Virginia, composer Judith Shatin relishes the sounds – all sounds – of the world in which we live. Combining her interests in natural sounds with their manipulation by means of electronics, Shatin has received commissions from around the globe: creating musical installations to celebrate important cultural and historic spaces, composing music for film, and working with a myriad of ensembles. She is not averse to more traditional inspirations, such as musical predecessors and great poetry, both of which help explain the genesis of her chamber piece, Marvelous Pursuits.

Marvelous Pursuits is a setting of Barbara Goldberg’s poetry cycle of the same name, in a scoring for vocal quartet and piano four-hands. Stimulated by a sentence concerning a man with two mistresses that Goldberg noticed in an 8th-century Japanese Pillow-Book, the poetry is a post-modern take on love and desire. It shows them to be partial, temporary, Byzantine. It plays with the Biblical command not to covet thy neighbor’s wife and with a man desiring his own wife only when someone else displays interest. The cycle is by turns whimsical and barbed, delightful and treacherous as Goldberg tells the story of a man who gives up his two mistresses and returns to his wife, suddenly dear because of the piano tuner’s desire for her. Shatin adds the following remarks on the work’s origin:

I was drawn to these poems for their ironic content, sonic wordplay, dramatic structure, and lively musicality. The internal rhyme in such pairs as “mistresses/tranquility”; “gaily/daily”; “kitchen/perfection”; “tart/marzipan”; and “sherry/Vespers” suggested musical designs that could amplify the sounds and content of the words. The dramatic structure, with its varied character groups and the epiphany of the man’s return to his wife suggested musical dénouement as well. My instrumentation was inspired by the Liebeslieder of Brahms. Marvelous Pursuits was commissioned by the New York Festival Chamber Players and premiered by them on a program that also featured the Liebeslieder at the Huntington Museum in Huntington, New York.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) ranks among the greatest opera composers in history. Many listeners will know his most familiar operas – Don Giovanni, La Nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte – and no doubt those same listeners can name signature arias, like “Dalla sua pace” or “Voi che sapete.” Sometimes, however, Mozart’s best vocal writing does not show up in a finished opera. Sometimes these ideas – wonderful in themselves – end up on the cutting room floor with no place to fit into the larger projects upon which he worked. Mozart composed no fewer than 40 such concert arias for soprano and instrumental accompaniment. In the case of Ch’io scordi di te, K. 505 (1786), the material had certainly been intended for inclusion in a revised version of Idomeneo. This version was only given privately, though the success of this one aria allowed it to take on a life of its own.

The text, possibly written by Lorenzo da Ponte, speaks of how love can survive separation:

But how could I attempt
to warm myself to another flame,
to lavish my affections on another?
Ah! I should die of grief!
Fear nothing, my beloved,
my heart will always be yours.

On the occasion of the departure of the brilliant English soprano Nancy Storace, who left Vienna in early 1787, Mozart pulled out this raw material, rescored it for voice and chamber orchestra, and added an obbligato keyboard part that he himself would play at the premiere. The ten-minute work opens with a short recitative prior to the aria. In fact, the aria alternates between agitated strings and unaccompanied vocal interruptions, making it feel like a recitative. Almost without our noticing, Mozart slides into a more lyrical vein for the beginning of the Rondo main theme. It is here that the piano enters; note that Mozart worked on this aria simultaneously with the great C-major Piano Concerto, K. 503. The aria thus benefits from two technical accomplishments that Mozart mastered in the concerto genre: brilliant keyboard writing and a dramatic dialogue between soloist and supporting ensemble. The keyboard part, embodying Mozart, seems to relish being in both spaces. Holding the ensemble together like a conductor, it still wants to venture with the soprano to the heights of dizzying virtuosity.

© Jason Stell, 2024