For six choreographed a cappella voices.
Katharina Rosenberger (music), Ludger Engels (direction), in collaboration with the Neue Vocalsolisten. Featuring contemporary and early music by Adrian Willaert (ca. 1490– 1562), Cipriano de Rore (1516– 1565) and Katharina Rosenberger (*1971), based on texts by Francesco Petrarch
(1304–1374).
Premiered March 18, 2016, Neue Vocalsolisten, St. Markus Church, Stuttgart, Germany.
tempi agitati is a full evening length vocal performance project, where the singers’ movements and positioning in space are driven by the music’s rhythms, textures and tempi. In close collaboration the composer Katharina Rosenberger and theatre opera director Ludger Engels have developed a performance strategy, which intents to merge vocal sounds, spatialization and body movement with the underlying narrative derived from Francesco Petrarch’s (1304–1374) Canzoniere and fragments of his letter Familiaris IV, I that describes his arduous ascent to the Mount Ventoux.
Evoking the spirit of the great Renaissance masters tempi agitati pays tribute to the composers Adrian Willaert (1490-1562) and his pupil Cipriano de Rore (1516-1565). As their madrigals fuse with Rosenberger’s score, rather, than a linearly unfolding concert performance, tempi agitati presents itself as a performance-laboratory; with each rendition given in a different architectural setting, new scenic concepts are developed to match the performers’ movements throughout the space, sound and structure of the open form compositions.