Free; required registration is through Eventbrite, here: https://italianacademy.columbia.edu/events/salon-angelica-kauffman
Rebecca Cypess, Director, on the English square piano
Jessica Beebe, soprano
Karen Dekker, violin
Dongmyung Ahn, violin
Eve Miller, cello
Adam Cockerham, English guitar
The Raritan Players offer "incomparable musicianship" (Early Music America); a recording from the group is "as ravishing as it is fascinating" (Classical Music).
Although Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) made her career in painting, she was also a gifted musician. In Rome in the 1780s, she hosted a salon that featured her own musical performances on guitar and on the English piano that she owned, as well as performances by some of the leading poetic improvisers of the age, such as Fortunata Fantastici and Teresa Bandettini. Her guests included local dignitaries as well as international travelers such as the English writer Hester Thrale Piozzi and the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In this program, the Raritan Players imagine an evening in Kauffman’s home, in which music mixed with discussion of literature and visual art. Selections include music by Pergolesi, Handel, Corelli, and Corona Schröter, as well as Scottish airs and musical-poetic recitation formulas that were used by poetic improvisers in Rome.
The Raritan Players explore lost performance practices and repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries through engagement with period instruments and new research in musicology.
See bios of the performers.
Watch the Raritan Players' Fall 2022 concert at the Italian Academy, "Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy."
