L'Homme Armé

Lume alla terra

On Friday, June 13th 2025 at 8:00 pm, the ensemble L’Homme Armé returns to the Zubin Mehta Hall.

Fabio Lombardo on the podium

The program features music by Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovan Battista Grillo, Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Ottavio Bargnani.

Florence, June 10th, 2025 – The Maggio Aperto cycle continues, the concerts that unite the Theater and its Festival with the world of the colorful and numerous musical realities of the territory, included in the 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival. Friday, June 13th, 2025 at 8:00 pm, in the Mehta Hall, the Ensemble L’Homme Armé, accompanied by the La Pifarescha band, conducted by Fabio Lombardo, presents “Lume alla terra” - Monteverdi sacred and profane.

For over four decades, L’Homme Armé has been engaged in intense research and concert and recording performances of the repertoire, mainly vocal, from the 14th to the 17th century, paying particular attention to the Florentine repertoire. Fabio Lombardo made his debut in the Maggio seasons, again with L’Homme Armé, in the spring of 2011. In addition to the ensemble L’Homme Armé, the evening’s protagonist was also the band La Pifarescha.

The concert is built around two important works by Monteverdi: the Missa in illo tempore, published in 1610 together with the very famous “Vespro della Beata Vergine”, and the Sestina. Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata, a cycle of madrigals on a text by Scipione Agnelli, composed in memory of Caterina Martinelli, published in 1614 in the VI book of madrigals: two works in which the sacred and the profane take on different connotations. In the case of the mass, composed in the ancient style (but published together with the Vespro, that is, the most modern thing conceivable at the time), we witness an explosion of contrapuntal fantasy that seems aimed at creating the new with ancient instruments. This Missa from 1610 (the other two for four voices were published in 1643 and 1650) actually has its roots firmly planted in Renaissance music, but its branches completely projected towards another era. Beyond the stylistic surface and the contrapuntal tour de force, the Missa in illo tempore reveals new musical perspectives, in particular in the almost modern tonal structure in which the counterpoint moves, and in the relationship of the text with the music. All aspects that distinguish a decidedly modern work despite using an ancient technique, indeed a declared homage to the glorious Flemish style.

The inclusion in this program of the famous Sestina. Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata, taken from the sixth book of Madrigals (published in 1614 when Monteverdi was already in Venice) might seem inappropriate: a cycle of madrigals in an almost entirely sacred context. In fact, the piece was commissioned from the composer by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga to commemorate the premature death (at 18, of smallpox) of Caterina Martinelli, known as la Romanina, a singer called from Rome to the court of Mantua for her very particular musical gifts. Behind the characters mentioned in Scipione Agnelli’s text, the shepherd Glauco and the nymph Corinna, hide the patron, the Duke himself, and the missing young woman. This cycle of madrigals, inserted in the broader Monteverdi production, clearly shows how the boundaries between sacred and profane become more blurred, unless one remains anchored to schematic or dogmatic clichés, concertante declamatory style = profane, chapel imitative style = sacred. The solemn character of the funeral commemoration acquires in this case a sacredness that takes on different hieratic tones compared to the contrapuntal complexities of the Mass in the program. The particularities of the polyphonic writing of these madrigals foreshadow the new way of feeling that in those years took the form of melodrama.

To close the program, conceived as an imaginary liturgy, a series of instrumental pieces by contemporary authors, colleagues or students of Monteverdi, entrusted to the magnificence of sound of the cornetto, the instrument that at the time came closest to the voice.