A Cardinal who never took holy orders, Mazarin, né Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, was born near Naples, grew up in Rome, and became Chief Minister of France. The most powerful advisor to Louis XIV was more fascinated by art than theology, importing innumerable Italian compositions and a fair number of Italian composers in service of the French state. His dedication to artistic splendor was a hallmark of his tenure and a gift to subsequent generations.

Native sons whom he championed include Luigi Rossi, Virgilio Mazzocchi, Francesco Cavalli and Giacomo Carissimi, and their work came to transform the music of France. Arias, cantatas, and operas by these Italian composers and more can be found to this day at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, where many treasures of Mazarin’s collection still await a performance in our own time.

In 1797 the walls of the Venetian Ghetto came tumbling down on orders of Napoleon. Bonaparte's favorite composer, Domenico Maria Puccini, the grandfather of Giacomo and Mozart’s contemporary, receives an American premiere of his precociously bel canto Sei Canzonette. His Czech coeval, Jan Ladislav Dussek, looks back rather than forward, penning a pianistic ode to a decapitated French Queen in The Sufferings of the Queen of France.

The Meyerbeer Hirtenlied and Weber Opus 33 Silvana Variations for clarinet and fortepiano paint a bucolic idyll, while a proto-Wagnerian song cycle by Louis Spohr caps off a program that stands on the ruins of the ghetto, looking forward into a Brave New World of dubious liberation.

A violinist in Monteverdi's orchestra, Salomone Rossi (c. 1570 – 1630) is credited with having invented the trio sonata. His introduction of polyphonic music to the synagogue, where only monody had been accepted as befitting a people in exile, earned him both scorn and praise from members of his community. His sister, a soprano at the same court that he served, premiered roles and sang madrigals of Monteverdi at Palazzo Te, the pleasure palace of the Gonzaga.

In his dual role as court and synagogue composer, Rossi inhabited two worlds at a curious time of both heightened physical segregation and active social interaction between Jews and Christians. A unique concert offers the special chance to explore the many forces that shaped his shifting world and beautiful music, and the tension between exile and acceptance that often recedes but never fades from history.

The chants and dances of Western Africa pre-date by centuries any music that we currently refer to as "early.” Come hear some of the oldest music known to us today – music that survived a harrowing ocean journey, centuries in the shadows of the Land of the Free, and which continues to pulse with enduring power through the amplified soundscape of modern popular song.

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An ensemble of acclaimed West African and African American virtuosi join forces in a thrilling performance of traditional Western African music from the areas that we now know of as Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

The nationalist German culture that exhalted Richard Wagner as a prophet of national identity saw the imagined Teutonic past enshrined in his operas as blueprints for the future. Yet the time and place that birthed the Aryan icon Meistersinger was also the source of an international, racial, and cultural hybrid which evolved into the quintessentially Jewish popular musical form known as Klezmer.

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An international ensemble offers a unique program of medieval repertoire from Germany, Poland, France, Bohemia, and the Middle East – distinctive national styles that entwined over centuries and emerged as an iconic soundscape of Ashkenazi Jewry. Music and Texts include works by Moniot de Paris, Mahieu le Juif, Guiraut Riquier, Obadiah the Proselyte, and anonymous songs and dances.

Before the bars of gender binaries caged the mainstream operatic imagination, a golden age of fluidity guided the vocal soundscape. Virility declared itself with the castrato’s clarion high notes, while femininity spoke in earthy tessiture that plunged to shimmering depths.

Texts of the period revel in ambiguity, unfurling genderless narratives of anonymous lovers and unnamed beloveds. Stories of active pursuit and passive reverie remain alike at loose ends, with neat resolutions many movements away.

This program, performed by a trans singer, reveals a golden underground of nonbinary riches, accompanying us in our witness to a new Renaissance. Music of Caccini, Campion, Dowland Strozzi, Handel and others.

The capital of Tunisia was once the legendary city of Carthage. Its Queen Dido, loved then abandoned by Aeneas on his mission to found Rome, inspired countless musical masterworks from the baroque era to Berlioz.

This concert alternates baroque cantatas and arias dedicated to the Carthaginian Queen with the Arabic form of improvisation known as Taksim, as two ensembles – one baroque and the other North African, share a stage, offering a new hearing of Dido the misused monarch and the site of Northern Africa as both exploited resource and Tabula Rasa of  Western European fantasy. Repertoire includes works of Cavalli, Couperin, DeVisée, Legrenzi, Montéclair, and Purcell, in alternation with traditional Taksim improvisations

While the Inquisition raged throughout Counter-Reformation Italy, the ghetto walls that separated Gentile from Jew were more porous than impenetrable. A lively dialogue between Jewish and Catholic musical cultures traversed the forbidding walls and enriched the music of both Synagogue and Sanctuary at a time of great oppression.

Works of Benedetto Marcello, Francesco Durante, Barbara Strozzi, Salomone Rossi, and unaccompanied Hebrew chants attest to a vibrant conversation, as do selections from the 1759 Hebrew libretto of Handel's Esther, commissioned by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the year of the composer's death.

Italian polyphonic music in the fourteenth century has been likened to a “dazzling meteor,” flaming into existence then disappearing abruptly with fireworks spent. One of the most important towns in medieval Italy is republican Florence which rose to prominence in the middle of the 14th century. With its distinct style of music and text, (Boccaccio, Soldanieri and others), compositions of Francesco Landini, Gherardello da Firenze, Don Paolo da Firenze, Laurentius da Firenze, and Jacopo da Bologna stand out as jewels of the repertoire.

Beyond this sparkling body of polyphony and song was a shadow world of many Jewish musicians and dance-masters who lived in Italy at the time. Alongside the elaborate polyphonic music and flashy dances they would play, sing, dance and teach, they composed hauntingly beautiful music for the synagogue. Some of the most beautiful piyutim, from Achot Ketanah for the High Holidays to Maoz Tzur for Hanukkah reappear in the secular music of the same era and continue to be sung in services today.

The fall of the Ancien Régime radically re-shuffled the social order throughout European capitals, ushering in a new era in inter-religious understanding and mass democratization. As the ghetto walls separating Jew from Gentile came tumbling down along with the unquestioning acceptance of clerical and royal authority, a newly ascendant bourgeois class demanded new compositions for the domestic sphere, with popular references and playable scores accessible to those with neither an aristocratic pedigree nor a piano.

Songs for soprano and Early Romantic Guitar by Cimarosa, Crescentini, Doisy, Haydn, Domenico Puccini and Fernando Sor join jewel-like arrangements from the popular operas of the day by Rossini and Halévy, speaking of an age of liberation and a growing taste for Bel Canto singing.

Heaven and Earth go back to back as two Marian Anthems frame a trio of tortured queens. Arias of Stradella’s conflicted Ester, Monteverdi’s dejected Ottavia, and Handel’s scheming Agrippina trace and arc from doubt to misery to bloodthirsty delusion, as two prayers to the Queen of Heaven flip from calm to turbulence on either side.

Opening with a courtly homage and concluding with an impassioned plea, the throne is more prison than privilege in this concert devoted to monarchs on the verge.

Music of Rigatti, Monteverdi, Stradella, Handel, Strozzi, and others.