EXAUDI

EXAUDI is one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles with a strong affinity for the outlying margins of new and ancient music. This group of singers can now be experienced at Musikfest Berlin in a late-night concert of chromatically spectacular Renaissance music: the very first piece of the evening, Orlando di Lasso’s motet “Timor et Tremor” (Fear and Trembling), requires the highest degree of vocal artistry with its expressive chromatic opening. The same is also true, of course, of the “Prophetiae Sibyllarum”: settings of prophecies of the ancient Sibyl that appear to point to the birth of Christ the Redeemer, which is why they were included in the liturgy from the 9th century. There are more highlights to come in the motets of Luca Marenzio, Cipriano de Rore and his pupil Luzzasco Luzzaschi, while “Heu me Domine” by Vicente Lusitano is a particularly special discovery. This singer in the Papal chapel was born the son of a Portuguese man and an African woman and is one of the first composing persons of colour to have had his works published. Finally, outstanding vocal performances are required by the madrigal fragments of Nicola Vicentino, in which the Italian Renaissance master freely transposed the chromatic and enharmonic traditions of ancient music theory to polyphonic music, effectively leading to a meantone temperament whose tiniest oscillations create fascinatingly fragile tonal imanges.