We invite you to a concert by the competition winners, which will focus on the theme of love. The Shanghai Camerata will perform a programme featuring works by Barbara Strozzi, Dario Castello, and Claudio Monteverdi – composers whose works reflect the different facets of this powerful feeling.

The Italian artist Barbara Strozzi was one of the most acclaimed singers of her time and an exceptionally prolific composer. Her legacy is almost exclusively secular; eight collections of her works were published during the Venetian’s lifetime. The concert programme includes an excerpt from the cantata Diporti di Euterpe, published in 1659: Lagrime mie, as well as the serenata Hor che Apollo è a Teti in seno from Arias op. 8. The violinist and composer Dario Castello, like Strozzi, hailed from Venice, where he performed and published his works. He wrote in stile moderno thus representing the avant-garde of the time. The core of his oeuvre consists of two collections of instrumental sonatas. Fate, however, did not grant him the chance to live and create long – the artist died at the age of just twenty-eight during the plague that struck Italy at the turn of the 1630s. Claudio Monteverdi, one of the most prominent figures of the early Baroque, was associated with Venice too (as well as Cremona and Mantua). His collection of Scherzi musicali was published in that city in 1632 by Bartholomew Magni. The artists will perform the fifth scherzo – Et è pur dunque vero.