Alexandra Coghlan

Mirror, mirror…

Plus: the raging, passionate talent of Barbara Strozzi at Kings Place

We increasingly accept the collision between life and art. Whether we’re puzzling over the real identity of Elena Ferrante, choosing our own adventure in Bandersnatch, or boycotting the latest Polanski film, we’re buying into culture that’s more mirror than window.

But wasn’t it ever thus? It’s a case Barbara Strozzi would certainly argue. The most-published Italian composer of her age, a musician whose work could stand alongside Cavalli, Rossi, even Monteverdi, was caught throughout her career in the double-bind of biography. You have only to look at her famous portrait — gazing insolently out at the viewer, breast bared — to see the erotics of performance at work. But whether Strozzi merely accepted the inevitable inferences of her male audience or actively fostered them, building the only brand possible for a female artist at this time, is unclear.

What is beyond question, though, is her talent. Spilling out of the neat, miniature forms — songs, madrigals — that were permitted her, it’s a raging, passionate thing that begs for the scope of the opera stage. Where else could Kings Place’s Venus Unwrapped — a year-long festival celebrating a thousand years of female composers across 95 concerts — better begin than here?

Christian Curnyn and the Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment were joined by soprano Mary Bevan for a concert whose handful of Strozzi songs and madrigals teased just a glimpse of this repertoire. There was much to savour in the naked sensuality of the ‘Canto di bella bocca’ — a duet brooding obsessively and indecently on a beautiful mouth — and the glistening flirtation of the trio for upper voices, ‘Le tre Gratie a Venere’. But there’s a depth to the solo songs that these more public madrigals lack, a sense of confessional intimacy that may be an illusion (Strozzi’s texts are never her own) but that speaks with seeming truth.

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