Piffaro, The Renaissance Band Presents LOVE, LUST, LIFE: CE MOYS DE MAY
By: A.A. Cristi Apr. 22, 2019
Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, will present its season finale, Love, Lust, Life: Ce Moys de May, with the female vocal ensemble Trio Eos, May 10-12 in Philadelphia & Wilmington. Tickets are $29-$49 (youth & full-time students free with ID), and are available at www.piffaro.org or by calling 215-235-8469.
Some things never change. The Renaissance playlist was full of love songs, just like today's Top 40. Sometimes composers sublimate their yearnings in the chaste language of nature. Sometimes, they are less discreet. Ce moys de may, written over 600 years ago, is shockingly direct: the narrator begins the song donning a green skirt in the "merry, merry month of May" and ends in instructing her beau to remove the skirt while she kisses him. French chansons and Italian madrigals illuminate the early modern romantic experience through a variety of prisms: Petrachean paradox, sublimated desire, noble courtship, rustic flirtation, and Love Victorious. The program will be repeated in Seattle on May 18 & 19.
About Trio Eos
"For a program like this, we required singers who were not only proficient in appropriate period performance style, but who project warmth and charisma from the stage," notes Piffaro artistic co-director Bob Wiemken. "A flair for the dramatic doesn't hurt, either. The women of Trio Eos possess all of these qualities in abundance. Jessica Beebe is a favorite with our audiences, having appeared as a soloist on two Christmas programs, and Maren Montalbano amply demonstrated her theatrical bent on our 2014 program of Elizabethan murder ballads at Eastern State Penitentiary."
This will be the California-based soprano Michele Kennedy's first outing with Piffaro, but all three are familiar to Philadelphia's choral audiences through their work with Grammy Award-winning chorus The Crossing. Beebe & Montalbano's Philadelphia connection goes deeper; they met while singing in the highly regarded parish choir at Saint Mark's Church in Center City.
Trio Eos was founded to illuminate the profound beauty of the female voice and its full range of expression from the early Middle Ages through the Twenty-First Century. Recent performances include a program of Hildegard Chants alongside new works by Susan Botti, Shulamit Ran, and Kate Soper with The Folger Consort at Washington National Cathedral and works by Matthew Schickele in the Five Boroughs Music Festival.
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