Festivals

Fresh Sound and Full Emotion of Early Music to Start of the 73rd Festival Music Programme

The Concert Programme, Under the title Muera, Cupido, Will Bring an Inspiringly Fresh and Emotion-Filled Early Music Opus

The rich music programme of the 73rd Dubrovnik Summer Festival will be opened by the acclaimed Spanish soprano Nuria Rial and the brilliant Fahmi Alquai on Quinton, joined by his internationally acclaimed ensemble Accademia del Piacere, with a concert in the Rector’s Palace atrium on Monday, 11 July at 9.30pm.

The concert programme, under the title Muera, Cupido, will bring an inspiringly fresh and emotion-filled early music opus with works by composers Francisco Guerau, Barbara Strozzi, Sebastián Durón, Giovanni Bononcini, Claudio Monteverdi and José de Nebra, along with Alqhai’s improvisation and arrangement of an unnamed work.

The soprano Nuria Rial, who perfected her vocal skills with Kurt Widmar, is one of the most prized voices on the baroque and classical scene, highly praised for her vocal purity, a characteristic style that combines naturalness with emotion, and the elegance of her phrasing. Rial is a multiple Opus Klassik award winner in various categories, most recently in 2020 for Best Soloist in the Opera category for the album Muera Cupido, which she recorded with the Syrian-Palestinian Seville native Fahmi Alqhai and the Accademia del Piacere. Fahmi Alqhai is among the most brilliant gambists of today, and has long established himself as one of the leading performers and interpreters of early music not only in Spain but on the European and world music scene. His personal project Accademia del Piacere is at the very top of European ensembles of its kind, a perfect blend of programmatic innovation and technical mastery of its members and their different sensibilities and temperaments through which new dimensions of standard early music repertoires are revealed and which has earned them numerous awards, most recently the GEMA Award in the category of the Best Spanish Baroque Ensemble in 2016 and 2017. Nuri Rial, Fahmi Alqhai and the ensemble Accademia del Piacere are bound by a shared breadth of artistic interests, both a love for early music as well as for stylistic-genre fusion.

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