Cleantha is a professional equal-voice ensemble. Comprising four original female musicians, the quartet is active in both early and contemporary repertoire.
It recently gave a successful performance of David Lang’s opera Love fail, and regularly premieres works by living composers. The quartet works on original programmes, the result of research into cross-disciplinary musical and aesthetic areas.
For this exceptional concert at the underground lake in St-Léonard, the vocal quartet, made up of Elisa Franzetti (soprano 1), Barbara Maiulli (soprano 2), Giulia Beatini (alto 1) and Paola Cialdella (alto 2), will be accompanied by theorbist Elisa La Marca.
On this magical evening, Cleantha will take you on a journey from Rome to Florence, from Naples to Ferrara, from Venice to London, via Genoa, bringing out the different accents and humanity of each of these places steeped in history.
Artemisia’s Aurora: not the chariot that opens the door to day, but the female goddess who chases away the darkness with her own hands and becomes light herself.
Artemisia Gentileschi is deeply immersed in the contemporary world.
Her complex human history is intertwined with the transition to the new world, from Copernicus to Caravaggio and Galileo, with whom she maintained a correspondence and personal exchanges.
She was the ideal companion for other women artists, such as Francesca Caccini, a pioneer of female emancipation, Vittoria Aleotti, Barbara Strozzi, and the Ladies of the Secret Concert of Ferrara, including Anna Guarini. The biographies are also interwoven with drama – the violence inflicted on the very young Artemisia, Anna’s uxoricide – in the fact that they come from families of artists and in the path of personal affirmation, in the access to study, to glory during life. There are also men in this fascinating story, from Galilei to Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, via Nicholas Lanier, Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Claudio Monteverdi: men who paid homage to these women in their compositions, devoting love, esteem and admiration to them.
The journey with Artemisia is an oxymoron, a thrilling adventure of strong, contrasting colours.
Surrounding this complex picture, this universe, are the satellite stars of today’s female voices, from the poetry of Lydia Davis to the works of Caroline Shaw and Kate Soper, who devotes a large part of her compositions to the female voice.
