Made in Italy – Italian Madrigals Englished

Bass singer Chris Lusty (year 3) tells us how music for Tudor merchants came back to a real period house – Southampton’s Tudor House Museum – during our Made in Italy weekend:

On Saturday, the University’s choral scholars, Cantores Michaelis, sang a selection of Italian madrigals by Luca Marenzio (1553 -1599) and Giovanni Maria Nanino (1543 -1607) that were translated and arranged into an English style by Albert Chatterley. Three of the pieces were sung tutti and the two other were sung by a vocal quintet and quartet respectively.  These madrigals were interspersed with solo lute music from the head of early music and world renowned lutist, Liz Kenny, and Katarzyna Milek, a PhD student in lute study. First we were rehearsed by our director Keith Davis and then coached further by Liz; we enjoyed the challenge of singing the music authentically rather than in the cathedral style that we are used to.

We began the day at 11am by running our set in the lounge room of the Tudor House, across the square from St Michael’s church.  It was a nice experience to sing secular music in a more fitting environment and in a style that we were not used to. Although for the first performance in the Georgian Room, we only had a small audience, it was fun to be able to relate this music on an intimate level without too much pressure. After a lengthy lunch break (in which some took the chance to enjoy a free tour of the house!), we returned to a large audience in the main hall for our second performance. We enjoyed the more generous acoustic here and relished the challenge of reading a few of the trickier numbers.

After the success of the day, my vocal quintets are following this event by performing a recital of Italian madrigals, this time by Claudio Monteverdi, in our summer examination. We are very much looking forward to building on what we have already learnt and learning more from Liz Kenny.