Maximiliano Danta

Wherever there’s light, there’s shade. Where there is order, chaos threatens. These opposites have permeated ideological concepts ever since the dawn of mankind and reach far back into the mythic and mystical past of all cultures. But hardly any other epoch grappled so intensively with the suffusion of darkness with light as the seventeenth century, the era that lay the groundwork for the European Enlightenment: where Caravaggio revolutionised the chiaroscuro of light and shade in his paintings, where theatre composers experimented with new forms of musical drama and with the interpretation of light and dark in sound, ordered moderation and tumultuous passion.

In the concert Chaos and Order, the multi-prizewinning Uruguayan countertenor Maximiliano Danta together with Gerd Ameling and the ensemble I Porporini take a trip through the grand world-theatre of music in the seventeenth century: for instance, in his opera La Niobe Agostino Steffani experimented with extraordinary sound colours to create a harmony of the spheres, whilst the Venetian composer Cristoforo Caresana in his cantata Il Narciso gave musical shape to the violent passion of the mythical Narcissus for his ephemeral mirror image. And in the prologue of his Giasone, Francesco Cavalli has the refulgent god of the sun take the stage, although the shadow side of love and exceedingly impenetrable chaos of emotions occasionally sound more beguiling than order and light.

With works by Francesco Cavalli, Agostino Steffani, Cristoforo Caresana, George Frideric Handel et al.