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| The Portrait Players (Emilia Agajew, Kristiina Watt, Claire Ward, Mirim Nohl) with Dame Emma Kirkby |
I Voci Segreti: Monteverdi, Luzzaschi, Quagliati, Piccinini, Ortiz, Malvezzi, Coma, Settimia Caccini, Marenzio, Francesca Caccini; The Portrait Players, Dame Emma Kirkby; City Music Foundation at Bart's Great Hall
Reviewed 8 April 2025
The seductive sweetness of three voices weaving in and around each other: Dame Emma Kirkby joins the young ensemble, The Portrait Players, for a programme celebrating the concerto delle donne and the fondness for all-female vocal ensembles in 16th century Italy
The court of the d'Este family, the Dukes of Ferrara in the 16th century is in many ways tantalising. Some of this is caused by distance, how can we know anything about life over 500 years ago. But in the case of the Dukes of Ferrara, when Alfonso II d'Este died without a direct heir in 1597 the d'Este family's hold on the dukedom withered and in 1598 it became papal fief and archives from the period were catastrophically lost.
Ferrara in 16th century matters, because it was a musical hothouse. Alfonso II created the concerto delle donne, a consort of professional female singers that existed from 1580 to 1597, famed for the singers' technical and artistic virtuosity. The women were upper class but not necessarily noble and the music performed was highly private, part of Alfonso's musica secreta concerts.
A highly trained ensemble, one of their innovations was to move from a single voice singing diminutions over accompaniment to two or three highly ornamented voices singing varying diminutions at once, with the ornaments notated in detail by the composers. The concerto delle donne was directed by court composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi and his surviving music for the group is precious.
This idea of a private ensemble of female singers was influential in Italy at the period and a recent concert by The Portrait Players, as part of the City Music Foundation's (CMF) lunchtime recital series in the Great Hall at St Bart's Hospital, explored this repertoire by focusing on the concerto delle donne in Ferrara and the music created for and by the Caccini sisters in Florence.
On Wednesday 8 April 2026, The Portrait Players (Claire Ward, soprano, Kristiina Watt, theorbo/voice, Miriam Nohl, cello and Emilia Agajew, harp) were joined by soprano Dame Emma Kirkby whose familiarity with this repertoire goes back many decades. Alongside madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Annibale Come, Settimia Caccini, Francesca Caccini and Luca Marenzio we heard instrumental music by Paolo Quagliati, Alessandro Piccinini, Diego Ortiz and Cristofano Malvezzi. Claire Ward was a CMF Artist from 2022 to 2024 and founded The Portrait Players in 2023.
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| Ferrara and its castle, home of the concerto delle donne |
In fact, the members of the concerto delle donne in Ferrara all played instruments too, including the lute and harp. For this concert Kristiina Watt both sang and played theorbo, sometimes simultaneously, with Miriam Nohl and Emilia Agajew providing the other instrumental support.
We began with Monteverdi, his O come è gran martire from the Third Book of Madrigals, which dates from the beginning of Monteverdi's years of service in Mantua. Here we had three voices (Claire Ward, Kristiina Watt, and Emma Kirkby) creating a magical sound, clear, dramatic and wonderfully interested in the words and their meaning.
We then moved to Ferrara, a distance of some 50 miles, for the first of Luzzaschi's madrigals, Aura Soave from his collection 12 Madrigali per Cantare e Sonare. For solo voice (Ward), it was an intimate piece with a sober sense of melancholy alongside poetic words. Here, and elsewhere in this concert, the rapid cascades of ornamental notes were shaped beautifully within the musical line. You could understand why, when sung in a tiny chamber, this music astonished. Dame Emma Kirkby talked about visiting Ferrara with The Consort of Musicke and seeing the remarkably small room where the concerto delle donne performed for the duke.
Next came an arrangement of an organ piece by Paolo Quagliati, Toccata ottava tono played by Nohl and Agajew, the arrangement giving a nice sense of the two duetting. Here again you noticed a fondness for cascades of notes.
We returned to Luzzaschi's madrigal collection for I mi son giovinetta, two voices this time (Ward and Watt) duetting in elaborate roulades but giving us an engaging sense of the dance. Alessandro Piccinini was a lutenist in Ferrara and Watt played his Toccata IV from Intavolature di liuto et di chitarrone. She explained that the theorbo was a relatively new instrument at the time, but we know that they were in Ferrara by the late 16th century. The sound was intimate with a gentle melancholy. The flurries of notes presented rhapsodically, rather than as a dance.
Strai pungente d'amore was another of Luzzaschi's madrigals, again a duet with Ward and Watt mixing elaborate lines, aching beauty and expressive pain. Diego Ortiz was Spanish, but he wrote the first manual on how to put division (sequences of rapid notes) on a theme. We heard his divisions on the popular tune Doulce Memoire played by Watt, Nohl and Agajew, though in this acoustic the cello slightly dominated the ensemble. For the final Luzzaschi madrigal in the programme, O dolcezz amarissime d'amore, Kirkby again joined Watt and Ward to create the seductive sweetness of three voices weaving in and around each other.
We then moved to Florence (some 100 miles from Ferrara). Cristofano Malvezzi wrote a significant amount of music for the Intermedi which featured at the 1589 royal wedding in Florence and which were so significant in the development of the operatic form. We heard and arrangement of his organ piece, Canzona played by Watt and Agajew. This had a formal feel to it, but with enlivening passing notes.
Annibale Coma was based in Mantua, and his Cantavan tre leggiadre pastorelle from Novelli Ardori featured three voices (Ward, Watt and Kirkby) singing about three seductive shepherdesses. This was highly intimate music, with Coma making lovely use of imitation in the three voice lines. Again, the singers brought out the words, and of course at this period the poetic texts were important too.
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| The Portrait Players & Dame Emma Kirkby at St Bart's Great Hall |
The Florentine sisters, Francesca and Settimia Caccini would sing in an ensemble with their mother, directed by their father the composer Giulio Caccini (responsible for music in those 1589 Intermedi and composer of some of the earliest operas). There was also an ensemble, le donne di Giulio Romano which featured them alongside his (female) pupils. Settimia was the younger sister. Her madrigal Due luci ridenti had elaborate roulades all in the context of a dance piece. The result was attractively melodic and catchy in a way that Luzzaschi's madrigals are not. We returned to the 1589 Intermedi for Luca Marenzio's Sinfonia and Belle ne fa natura which gave us an engaging instrumental introduction then a lovely trio of voices with harp accompaniment, again with the seductive use of imitation. We then returned to the Caccini sisters for Francesca's O Vive rose from her Primo Libro delle Musiche. This was a solo piece sung by Ward, attractively dancey and catchy.
We ended with Monteverdi again in Mantua. A trio, Lumi miei, cari lumi from the Third Book of Madrigals. Urgent and very present, with an expressive use of the flurries of notes in each part.
There was an encore. A piece, again for three voices, from Francesca Caccini's opera La liberazione di Ruggiero. The oldest surviving opera by a woman (and Francesca Caccini's only surviving opera); it was written for the Medici court in Florence.
Dame Emma Kirkby has been associated with this music for much of her career. She has been coaching the ensemble as well as singing with them, and they are repeating the programme in Cambridge in June, see their website for details.
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