PDtP 29: it did exactly what it said on the tin

Monday’s session was subtitled Singing And Tremendous Boozing , and judging by both my sore throat (more on this below) and head on Tuesday morning, I think it’s safe to say we delivered on this promise.

We had a great crowd in as usual, with many old hands and some new faces getting stuck into the singing action.

Following his absence in February, Bach was back with some lovely chorales to start us off, before getting going with the really old stuff, including works by Lobo, Marenzio, Vivanco, Gallus & Tallis.

Apologies that I joined in with the sopranos on several occasions – judging from the reactions from my neighbours, I fear I don’t have a glittering countertenor career ahead of me.

And of course it wouldn’t be a PDtP session without the usual injection of humour from the floor, though something of a rarity for it to come from a tenor…

Even rarer than an amusing tenor, though, is a Renaissance woman composer, and so I am very pleased that we were able to include works by three* of them, in anticipatory celebration of International Women’s Day.

And what works they were! Undoubtedly they represented the highlight of the whole evening, notably for the marvellous harmonic journeys within the Casulana and Raffaella Aleotti and the proto-Baroque passages within the Vittoria Aleotti, and I hope that it won’t be too long before we revisit these fascinating composers.

Our next PDtP session will be Monday April 3rd; details will follow soon.

In the meantime, you’ll recall that we have a Counterpint in the Cafe on Thursday March 16th. Following robust feedback from people on Monday (I mean, there were no pitchforks and torches but I nonetheless sensed a definite animosity in the crowd), the idea of making spaces available exclusively via Facebook was not popular, so as a compromise, I’ll release the first half of spaces via fb and then the second half will go live at 9am this Saturday via this blog post.

So everyone will have the opportunity to sign up, but if you reeeeeeeeeeeeally want to maximise your chances then like our Facebook page!

Cheers

Kevin

*Some areas of scholarship believe that Vittoria and Raffaella are in fact the same woman but for our purposes they’re not. So there.