Francisca Aronsson

His colleague Georg Philipp Telemann, who was only a few years older, described him as “the greatest spirit of his time”. Reinhard Keiser is a striking example of a musician who was held in the highest esteem in his time, but is hardly present today. He wrote numerous stage works for the Hamburg Opera at the Gänsemarkt.

Cela fait plusieurs années que le prince brésilien de la guitare Nelson Veras voulait former son trio. Après deux disques sous son nom : l'un en quartet en 2004 et le dernier en Solo en 2009, Nelson Veras se lance dans l'aventure du trio, en recrutant une rythmique de rêve, son ami de longue le batteur belge Stéphane Galland et le jeune prodige américain de la basse Thomas Morgan connu pour avoir déjà oeuvré malgré son jeune âge aux côtés Steve Coleman, Paul Motian, John Abercrombie, Dave Binney,…

Antwerp, city of harpsichords Antwerp, around the middle of the 17th century. Music issues from an imposing house on the Meir. Inside the house, paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, Vermeer and Tintoretto hang everywhere. A small but international group seated close to the fireplace is listening to a concert arranged especially for them. Francisca Duarte (1619-1678), who lives in the house, plays one of the many Ruckers-Couchet harpsichords and virginals owned by the Duarte family. She has chosen the music carefully: there are works from old collections of manuscripts compiled for and by the Duarte family, including music by John Bull and arrangements of dances and songs, as well as new repertoire by harpsichord virtuosos such as Jacques Champion de Chambonnières and Johann Jakob Froberger who have shared their recent compositions with the family. One of the guests, Béatrix de Cusance, noted in a letter ‘Dear Francisca lets us hear unusual and extraordinary things. She plays a thousand times better from day to day’. Francisca’s father Gaspar, and her sister Leonora frequently perform with her; he is a lutenist and she is a singer. Heavenly music continues to resound in Antwerp until well after midnight.

On the coasts of the Atlantic, sparrows whistle atop the trees, Eastern winds whisper through spartina grasses, and fiddler crabs skitter within their sandy burrows — a great symphony of shorelines soon to be left incomplete.