It's never too late for Early Music! 400 year old madrigals; re-discovered and recorded for the first time in 2013...

Pomponio Nenna? Never heard of him.

No, you probably have not - but then, that's exactly what we'd like to change.

The vocal music composed in Italy during the Renaissance was no less than spectacular, and much of it has survived and is popular among classical music lovers even today. Madrigals by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz and Carlo Gesualdo have been performed, recorded and re-recorded again and again, and by some of the world's greatest vocal consorts (Concerto Italiano, La Venexiana, Consort of Musicke, I Fagiolini and Cantus Cölln to name a few).

The composer Pomponio Nenna (1556 - 1608) moved within the same musical circles and wrote his madrigals during the same time period; within the same artistic paradigm as these great artists - but fate would have it that most of his compositions were left collecting dust on library shelves; virtually forgotten. Until a German musicologist came along, that is...

Danes singing madrigals? Really?

...and with passion, too! Per Passione is a group of professional singers who all share a particular interest in the music of the late Renaissance and the early Baroque. We are based in Aarhus, Denmark - which makes us one of this country's first (and very few!) one-to-a-part vocal consorts. Since the ensemble was formed in 2007, we have toured and performed all over the country. Our goal has ever been to make the music of the Renaissance accessible to the modern day audience; to bring down the barriers that time has worked so dilligently to put up between us and the great art that was made back then. In our performances we tackle this challenge by diverse means: our commitment to performance practice is usually accompanied by either scholarly or more popular presentations that serve to illustrate how music is never composed within a vacuum.

The present project, however, would never have come about were it not for the German musicologist Mirco Oswald, who is the genius behind the modern edition of Nenna's eighth book of madrigals. Mirco's work with the original manuscripts; putting the music into modern notation and - even more importantly - putting it into context, has been the starting point of this project: Mirco was the one who made us aware of this little forgotten gem.

30.000 DKK? That's a lot of money...

Yes, it is - but it's not nearly as much as we need to make such a recording see the light of day in a country where wages, as well as taxes and VAT, are notoriously high - and where classical music holds a somewhat less than prominent place in the public mind. (We e.g. don't have a full-time classical radio channel on FM anymore.) It has, in other words, proved excessively hard to raise the money we need, but we are on our way! With your help we will reach our goal and be able to deliver to the publishers a product of excellent quality; recorded and edited by a professional sound engineer, who will be able to make the beautiful voices and instruments sound their very best on record.

There's much more information about the project available on our website -

www.perpassione.dk/pomponionenna-en.html

- or, for the Danes

www.perpassione.dk/pomponionenna.html

We'll provide our audience with updates on the project via Facebook and Twitter:

www.facebook.com/perpassione

www.twitter.com/perpassione

And, finally: If you'd like to learn some more about composer Pomponio Nenna, start here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pomponio_nenna

 

THANK YOU!