Josep Maria Montaner, Zaida Muxí

On Eternità d’amore, Josep María and I assembled a collection of vocal chamber music by Monteverdi and his musical inheritors as a point of departure. The music and decadent history of Venice of the 17th century seemed the perfect subject for the culmination of our respective musical experiences thus far as well as a base to cultivate our ideas. In our quest for repertoire, we opted for works that lend themselves idiomatically to the archlute (and tenor), seeking out exceptional pieces of music best served by performances that are very direct, rich, and detailed.

House plans and home plans are in our blood. The second generation has joined this family-run house plan business to help you find your dream house plan.

En La Muralla deja patente su peculiar estilo con un dibujo solido, realista pero lleno de gran imaginación, adentrandonos en historias fantasticas de gran subrealismo que intenta evadirnos de la realidad, La evasión de la realidad. La huida de lo terreno. Este es el afán que anima el espíritu creativo de Beà. Pero no se trata de un rechazo del mundo, tan sólo es una renuncia consciente a las ataduras de nuestra conciencia (la rutina de lo cotidiano, las imposiciones del presente, el mar de dudas en el que nos ahogamos…) que tanto marcan nuestra forma de ver lo que nos rodea.

Imitar col canto chi parla' ('imitating in song one who speaks'): that ideal, expressed by Jacopo Peri in the preface to his setting of Euridice, heralded a veritable revolution in vocal music, beginning with the experiments, towards the end of the sixteenth century, of the Florentine Camerata – a group of intellectuals and musicians led by Count Giovanni de’ Bardi, who aimed to revive the glorious art of ancient Greek tragedy. According to written accounts, the latter was sung, or spoken, in such a way that the words, while remaining intelligible at all times, were emotionally heightened. The members of the Camerata wished thus to break with the polyphonic madrigal tradition of the Renaissance and turn to accompanied monody, recitar cantando, thereby returning to the pre-eminence of the word as the means of conveying human emotions, with the music, henceforth subordinate to speech, serving to magnify and amplify it.

Callas's two comic roles were both in operas by Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia and Il turco in Italia. She first played the capricious and flirtatious Fiorilla - a married Neapolitan woman who takes up with a visiting Turk - in Rome in 1950. Five years later, at La Scala, she appeared in a production by Franco Zeffirelli, also, famously, the director of her Covent Garden Tosca and Paris Norma. Gramophone wrote: 'Callas acts vividly, chiding, boasting, melting, and when in typical Rossinian style she is given a 'key' figure, each repetition of it carries, so one thinks, a slightly different meaning. I found myself teased by memories of these little phrases for hours afterwards'.