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Cappella Mediterranea & Leonardo García Alarcón
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Cappella Mediterranea & Leonardo García Alarcón · Cappella Mediterranea is an ensemble for Baroque music, founded by the Argentine conductor Leonardo García Alarcón. He was born in 1976 in La Plata and studied harpsichord and organ. For years he was an assistant to Gabriel Garrido before starting his own ensemble. With Cappella Mediterranea he has performed at many festivals, above all the Festival d'Ambronay. After a performance of Il diluvio universale by Michelangelo Falvetti, a seventeenth-century composer, he was made an honorary citizen of Ambronay.
Music and breakthrough
García Alarcón teaches at the conservatoire in Geneva and researches the way the basso continuo, the fixed accompaniment of bass and chords, was played in the seventeenth century. Together with the violinist Stéphanie de Failly he leads the Ensemble Clematis, and since 2010 he has been artistic director of the Chœur de chambre de Namur and of La Nouvelle Ménestrandie.
Influence
The ensemble plays early music in a historically informed way, with attention to rhetoric and colour. In the performance of a madrigal such as Il bianco e dolce cigno by Jacques Arcadelt from 1539, the Renaissance sounds, the time in which poet and composer sought one voice together. In this way the ensemble represents a side of music history that precedes pop music, and yet shows how long people have been singing songs about love.
Listening
Il bianco e dolce cigno (Arcadelt) · Cappella Mediterranea & Leonardo García Alarcón, 1539