Charlotte Bach Festival: Lagrime mie: Songs of Lamentation, Disdain, and Renewal

Lagrime mie: Songs of Lamentation, Disdain, and Renewal explores the overlapping musical worlds of Elizabethan lute song and Italian recitative lament—featuring works by Dowland, Lanier, Rossi, and Monteverdi. Lanier’s expressive and expansive scena Hero’s Lament to Leander breaks the strictures of small form lute songs, channeling its heroine’s complex emotional shifting sands through the recitative style typical of the compositional and rhetorical frames imposed by contemporary Italian composers and pairs exquisitely with Rossi’s Lament di Zaida moro. The recitative lament as a genre is flanked by more restrictive, yet equally soul-baring musical forms, including Claudio Monteverdi’s Voglio di vita uscir, a curiously upbeat lament set over the ciaccona ground base, offering a shining beam of possibility and light in an otherwise dark world.