Incantare presents Renaissance music influenced by the life and art of Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto. This visually and aurally sumptuous program explores music by Italian composers from the Venetian School, pairing musical works by Andrea Gabrieli, Gioseffo Zarlino, Nicola Vicentino, Leonora Orsina, Madalena Casulana, and others with visual art by Tintoretto and other Venetian artists such as Titian, Veronese, and Bellini. Lush Italian madrigals and motets balance improvisatory solos, dances, and canzonas that mirror the richly-hued textures of the paintings.

Il Furioso contains spoken narration in the form of a fictional sixteenth-century dialogo—a scripted pedagogical discourse in the style of Socrates—between Tintoretto and his daughter, the artist and musician Marietta Robusti. Through Robusti’s questions and her father’s answers, the audience learns about the music, imagery, and life as an artist and musician in Renaissance Venice.

Past Performances
The Baroque Room, Saint Paul, MN (2023)
Ganz Hall, Chicago, with The Newberry Consort (2024)
Hyde Park Union Church, Chicago, with The Newberry Consort (2024)
Saint Luke’s Church, Evanston, with The Newberry Consort (2024)

EXILE explores the influences of Italian, German, and eastern European music and Jewish culture, highlighting Jewish musicians, the non-Jewish composers they influenced, and composers who inspired innovations in Jewish composition. Featuring composers such as Rossi, Vierdanck, Monteverdi, and others, this program highlights the mutual influences of the early modern European Jewish experience, breaking down preconceptions of Jewish music and culture and exploring the implications of diaspora on Jewish artistic legacy.

Past Performances:
Center for Jewish History, New York, NY (2022)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2022)
Madison Early Music Festival, Madison, WI (2022)
Beth El Synagogue, Twin Cities, MN (2021)
Malmgren Concert Series, Syracuse University, with educational residency. Syracuse, NY (2023)
Singletary Center, Lexington, KY (January 2024)
Comstock Hall, Louisville, KY (January 2024)

This program pays homage to the effects of the Thirty Years War on composition and culture in seventeenth-century Germany. The program illuminates the music of lesser-known wartime and postwar composers: the refugees Heinrich Grimm and Andreas Hammerschmidt; the British immigrant William Brade and his close multi-instrumentalist colleague Johann Schop; the controversial Johann Rosenmüller; Johann Vierdanck, star musician of the Dresden court; and Johann Rudolph Ahle, whose style directly influenced Bach and the subsequent high Baroque. All of these composers are intimately connected: driven from city to city by sickness and war, brought together by extraordinary musical abilities, their music creates a bright path that leads us through and beyond a period of impenetrable darkness.

Past Performances:
Twin Cities Early Music Festival (2018)
Hamilton Performing Arts Series, Clinton, NY (2022)

A program of music from worlds both old and new. Our story begins in sixteenth-century Florida and expands to Spanish territories throughout the Americas. Performing sonorous polyphony, upbeat villancicos, and stately dances from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the Iberian Peninsula, we respectfully explore the shared musical communities in North America and beyond.

Past Performances:
Housewright Virtuoso Series, Florida State University, with weeklong educational residency. Tallahasse, FL (2022)

Incantare presents music from 16th and 17th century Ducal Prussia. During a time of great political maneuvering, religious conflicts, and the solidification (and breaking down) of world powers, musicians continued to make art in their own shifting populations throughout what we now know as Germany and Poland. Incantare explores this music, which has far outlived those who rose and fell from power so many years ago, in an intimate concert for violin, sackbuts, solo voice, and organ.

Past Performances:
Twin Cities Early Music Festival, Saint Paul, MN (2018)

Incantare features the trombone in all its glory! Accompanied by violin, voice, and continuo, our program demonstrates the versatility and warmth of the trombone in music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Past Performances:
International Trombone Festival, Muncie, IN (2019)