On August 18, 2023, Consort of Voices was back in the Great Church of Veere. With Apollo e Dafne by G.F Handel, the ensemble, led by conductor Korneel Bernolet, performed an ode to the arts. Vocal soloists were Heleen Goeminne (soprano) & Kris Belligh (bass). The collaboration with visual artist Renée Herleef was exceptional. During the concert, she created visual work on three canvases, starting on the first note of the music and ending on the very last. The audience followed the full creative process from A to Z.
The artistic result was a dialogue between classical music and visual arts, involving the live audience. During the live performance, visual artist Renée Herleef appeared on stage as a third soloist, so to speak.
Apollo e Dafne
Apollo e Dafne is a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This timeless story fits surprisingly well with our fast-changing society, whose main themes are desire and transformation.
In 1625, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) commissioned Cardinal Scipione to create the world-famous sculpture Apollo e Dafne, which can be found in Galleria Borghese in Rome. Other artists have also been and continue to be inspired by this ancient story. Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) set the story to music in 1710 in the form of an extended secular cantata (a kind of mini-opera) for two vocal soloists (soprano and bass) and baroque orchestra.
Consort of Voices
The ensemble has been active since 2010 with a base in Middelburg. It is the only baroque ensemble in Zeeland that makes music according to the principles of historically informed performance practice. This means that the ensemble approaches the music as much as possible from sources such as autographs and facsimiles, researches playing methods and plays on historical instruments or copies thereof. In this way, the ensemble builds on the ideas of the great pioneers of the second half of the 20th century such as Gustav Leonhardt, Nicolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen. Musicians with whom the Netherlands built an important international reputation in the field of baroque music.
The Hurgronje Family Fund made a financial contribution to the realisation of this concert.
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