Crepuscolo Götterdämmerung

Jessica Gould, soprano

Eric Hoeprich, clarinet

Diego Cantalupi, classical guitar

Christoph Hammer, fortepiano

One of the world's leading historical clarinetists, Eric Hoeprich, joins us from London for this program, originally premiered at the Accademia Bartolomeo Cristofori of Florence, Italy,

In 1797 the walls of the Venetian Ghetto came tumbling down on orders of Napoleon. Bonaparte's favorite composer, Domenico Maria Puccini, the grandfather of Giacomo and Mozart’s contemporary, receives an American premiere of his precociously bel canto Sei Canzonette. His Czech coeval, Jan Ladislav Dussek, looks back rather than forward, penning a pianistic ode to a decapitated French Queen in The Sufferings of the Queen of France.

Giacomo Meyerbeer returns from the Opéra Comique, this time in German mode in a charming Hirtenlied, while a proto-Wagnerian song cycle by Louis Spohr caps off a program that stands on the ruins of the ghetto, looking forward into a Brave New World of dubious liberation.