Berit Norbakken & Solmund Nystabakk
PRE-ORDER: This item will be shipped with the aim to deliver on release day.
Description
This album documents some of our meetings with Barbara Strozzi. In her time, and long after her death, Barbara Strozzi was a legendary performer, something that in her case has been highlighted far more than among her male colleagues. Why? In light of her extensive production and publishing activities, it seems almost absurd that she should not be considered a composer on par with any-one else, and one wonders if this too has to do with gender, if being a singer is so much less controversial for a woman than being a com-poser, that it has almost functioned as a "mitigating circumstance"?
As an artist, you have more direct connection to the music compared to experiencing it through someone else's rendition. The fact that Barbara Strozzi wrote so much of her music with her own performances in mind, means that her pieces be-come places or spaces where one can immerse oneself in another (her?) way of making music. In these spaces, Barbara's authority as a performer, and originator, of the music becomes avail-able to us as co-creators today.
The freedom and flexibility that come from accompanying oneself – as Barbara did – has been a model for our work in the duo format. This involves a coherence that gives us the freedom for spontaneous turns and variations along the way in the music, so that each performance becomes different. The continuous practice –singing and playing the music again and again, with openness to both planned and spontaneous variations, becomes more crucial to the audible result than one specific interpretation of each piece as a composition.
Tracklisting
Torleif Thedee & Marianna Shirinyan
Oslo Kammerkor, Hakon Daniel Nystedt
Berit Norbakken & Solmund Nystabakk
Magnus Boye Hansen, Mathias Halvorsen
Tine Thing Helseth, tenThing Brass Ensemble
Marianne Beate Kielland, Halvor Festervoll Melien, Nils Anders Mortensen
Jan Martin Smordal
Daniel Saether, Ensemble C4
