The Newberry Consort: Celestial Sirens

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This concert features an ensemble of eight women’s voices directed by Ellen Hargis. The ensemble explores the music of the Baroque convents of Italy and Mexico, where behind cloister walls, these gifted women composed, arranged, and performed virtuoso music for their own devotional use, singing in astonishing vocal ranges. Organ and viola da gamba will accompany the music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Alba Tressina, and Sulpitia Cesis; and from the Newberry Library Choirbooks, compositions by Fabían Pérez Ximeno, Juan de Lienas, and Tomás Luis de Victoria. Beguiling and intelligent, provocative and classic, ravishingly beautiful and deliciously edgy, The Newberry Consort has been delighting audiences for nearly three decades. Directed by David Douglass and early music diva Ellen Hargis, the ensemble plumbs the Newberry Library’s vast collection and assembles a star-studded roster o artists who present world-class performances of music from the 13th to the 18th centuries.