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New podcast : Battuto and Pizzicato, the story of the baroque guitar

wed 10 aug 2022
Theme: Early Music

New to the Concertzender: an English language podcast five part series covering the history of the baroque guitar, from the middle of the 16th century to around 1730. Baroque guitarist Lex Eisenhardt will discuss the early history of the repertoire, set against the background of the instrumental and vocal music of the time. It will be compared with compositions for other instruments such as the lute and the theorbo.

These podcasts are an adaptation of the radio programmes which were broadcast from January to May 2022 on the Concertzender. Repeated requests to make an English translation, from non-Dutch speakers, spurred Lex to rebroadcast the texts of this series once again, this time in English.

Listen to the podcasts via this link.

 

Important composers

Characteristic of solo music from 1630 are the changes between struck chords (battuto in Italian) and plucked multivoices such as on the lute (pizzicato).
Compositions from the most important composers in this hitherto largely unknown style such as Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Michelangelo Bartolotti, Francesco Corbetta, and Robert de Visée will be covered, but also music from even less well known composers such as Domenico Rainer en François Campion.
In addition attention will be paid to the repertoire based on Spanish folklore, by Gaspar Sanz and Santiago de Murcia.

 

Lex Eisenhardt

Lex Eisenhardt has always had a preference for direct contact with the strings, without the use of bow or keyboard, so it was a no-brainer that in the 70’s he studied guitar and lute in Utrecht. An advantage is that you can play multi-voiced music on one instrument, so you quite literally have control over the performance in your own hands.

After graduating he taught at the Amsterdam Conservatorium until retirement in 2018. The crown of his lengthy research into the baroque guitar was the publication of his book ‘Italian Guitar Music of the Seventeenth Century’, published by The University of Rochester Press in 2015.

Want to know more? Then go to the website of Lex.