Fiori are thrilled to announce that we have been selected as one of the 22 established ensembles nationally who have been successful in the latest round of Continuo Foundation grant awards. This is a huge honour! Thank you to Continuo Foundation from all at Fiori Musicali. We wouldn’t be able to bring our lovely music to the people of this part of the world without this generous support.
The grant application is tough and highly competitive and involves creating exciting and unusual projects. Our project this time is Music and the mythical Phoenix – a series of three concerts, all inspired in various ways by the legend of the phoenix with its symbolism of death and renewal. Civilisations rise and fall. Out of the ashes of one, another arises – phoenix-like.
With the‘every-day-in-every-way-easy-street’ style of Western life in flames, the world stands at a precipice – a time of tremendous change. Through the ages the arts have always sought to encapsulate & transmit ideas. The subtle but powerful art of music is a perfect medium for this and as we witness the seismic shifts in technology & world order on our planet today Fiori create a series of concerts based on the myth of the Phoenix – fabulous symbol of death and rebirth.
First up is a unique concert to mark St Cecilia’s Day (22 November). The martyred Cecilia (patron saint of music) yearns for death & rebirth through the ecstasy of mystic union with the Divine – a direct reference to the mythical phoenix. To mark her feast day we perform Quirino Columbano‘s Martyrdom of St Cecilia (1701), in the fine Spencer Church at Great Brington. We are grateful to Holly Roberts of Oregon University for generously allowing us to use her research & performing material, and with her blessing we give this beautiful oratorio its first ever professional public performance, opening a window for audiences on exciting unknown Italian repertoire at the turn of the 18th-century.
St Cecilia is deeply intertwined with mediaeval art & culture. Her association with healing & the gift of sight inspires us to explore music by another key mystic & healer – the medieval visionary Hildegard of Bingen, on 25 April at Ashby St Ledgers. The phoenix is linked to the sun (it greets the dawn with song) & to Christ’s resurrection – giving us an excuse to perform Hildegard’s ecstatic vocal compositions (aware that even amid the religious fervour of 12th-century Europe, Hildegard felt constrained by the patriarchal world to hide the fact of her visions till she became an abbess).
And between these two concerts a passing nod to the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence – a seismic event, upturning the notion of British colonialism in the States and giving birth to the world’s largest economy. So on 22 March we visit the ancestral home of George Washingtonat Sulgrave Manor, metaphorically bringing the factions together through benign music from 1776, including flute quartets published then by JC Bach, the ‘London’ Bach in a programme entitled 1776 and all that!
So thank you Continuo Foundation. This grant means that Fiori can continue reaching new audiences, targeting especially those outside the big cities who through rural isolation, advancing age, infirmity or financial circumstances would otherwise have little chance to hear the phoenix-call of some of today’s finest early music specialists performing this exciting period music live at venues near them.