After Venice had been decimated by the two-year plague which swept through Europe, spread by soldiers in the Thirty Years War, Claudio Monteverdi was commissioned in 1631 to stage a thanksgiving service in the great St Mark’s Cathedral to mark the end of the pandemic. Afterwards the musicians and audience walked across the Grand Canal on a bridge of boats to witness the laying of the foundation stone of the famous plague church Santa Maria della Salute.
This thanksgiving and salute to resurrection, in the city which had invented quarantine as a means of tackling a previous outbreak, resonated strongly with Bach Akademie Australia founder and Artistic Director Madeleine Easton. Therefore, after three difficult years of COVID, she set about closing the group’s 2022 season with a reconstruction, celebrating the return to live performance and paying tribute to the musicians, audiences and composers who miraculously survived the second wave of the Black Death.
This spectacular two-part concert – the Akademie’s Angel Place debut, which will go down for this reviewer as one of the highlights of the 2022 season...
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