Blue Heron is a professional early music and Renaissance vocal ensemble now in its 23rd season. Acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for its “expressive intensity,” Blue Heron is considered the finest of its kind in North America. Feel free to visit www.blueheron.org for more information.

On February 12, 2022, we are presenting Un petrarchino cantato, Petrarch's Canzoniere in song. The program is a musical valentine of 16th-century madrigals setting poetry by Petrarch. Petrarch beheld a lovely young woman, Laura, and was instantly pierced through by love at once carnal and spiritual. His love for Laura would obsess, torment, and inspire him until her death from the plague in 1348 and beyond, for the rest of Petrarch’s life, shaping his work and the very meaning of his existence. Petratch's Canzoniere reigned through centuries to ultimately inspire some of the most expressive, beautifully crafted, and emotionally powerful music of the sixteenth century. Music by Arcadelt, Willaert, de Rore, Wert, Marenzio & others is exquisitely presented by six Blue Heron musicians, with dramatic recitation of poems and other writings in Italian by Alessandro Quarta (https://www.blueheron.org/about-us/musicians/alessandro-quarta/) and in English translation by Jade Guerra (https://www.blueheron.org/about-us/musicians/jade-guerra/). 

Presented by Camilla Parisi, Ph.D. in History of Art from The Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Camilla Parisi is an art historian, and she is currently working at the post-earthquake reopening of the Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo in L’Aquila. She received her Ph.D. in October 2019 from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with a dissertation on the sculptor Filippo della Valle (1698-1768), whereas she studied for her B.A. and M.A. in Rome at La Sapienza Università di Roma. Her education includes a diploma in restoration and conservation of artworks at the Istituto Italiano Arte Artigianato e Restauro, a school that collaborates with the Vatican Museums. In 2015 she has been fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. During her university years, she collaborated to several exhibitions on different artists, as Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Tiziano and Canova. She worked for a short period at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem and, most recently, she has been assistant curator for Sfida al Barocco, an important exhibition held in Turin in 2020. From fall 2020 and summer 2021, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore with a project on the collections of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence.

In collaboration with the Dante Alighieri Society of Massachusetts and the Fernanda Ghi Dance Academy, three well-known descendants of Italian immigrants from South America will be "reviving the spiritual ties of compatriots abroad" as envisioned by the society’s founders in 1893. The Duo Scofano-Minetti (bandoneón/piano) walks the fine line between the classical, the folk, and the popular by presenting a stunning repertory of South American music.

Enjoy an evening of music, dance, and instruction from world-class performers from South America at the Dante Alighieri Society (41 Hampshire Street; Cambridge, Massachusetts) in celebration of Carnevale di Tango on Saturday evening, February 26, 2022. The Duo Scofano-Minetti (bandoneón/piano) will present a stunning repertoire of music with astonishing power in support of a beautifully choreographed tango performance by world-champion Fernanda Ghi and her partner Silvio Grand. It is the intensity of their performances and interpretations, their extraordinary level of musicianship and dance, and the originality of their compositions that makes this performance so unique.

Visit Eventbrite for online purchases or in-person at Dante Alighieri.

Editorial Staff of the Newsletter: Antonio Talarico

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