Barbara Strozzi: Virtuosa of Venice
Fieri Consort
Fieri Records FIER003VOV. 67’18

The Fieri Consort was founded in 2012 by members of the Genesis Sixteen training programme to perform music from 16th and 17th-century Italian repertoire. This is their third CD and focusses on the music of the distinguished Italian composer Barbara Strozzi and her contemporaries Giovanni Girolamo Kasperger, Bartolomeo Selma y Salaverde, Benedetto Ferrari, Claudio Monteverdi. Strozzi is a fascinating musician, not least as a female musician in a man’s world. She had liberal and artistic parents – her father was the poet Giulio Strozzi. When she was 18 (in 1637) he founded the Accademia degli Unisoni specifically to display his daughter’s musical skills. She quickly became famed across Venice as a singer who could ‘steal the souls of her listeners through their ears with sweetness’. Continue reading →