Celebrating Barbara Strozzi

Operabyrån celebrates the 400-year anniversary of the birth of Barbara Strozzi with a resounding anniversary concert! This deluxe party will feature solo cantatas, duets, instrumental music and dances performed by some of the country’s most in-demand Baroque artists.

Operabyrån’s performances unite Baroque music and occasionally new compositions with subjects that are both relevant and urgent today, and in which women from history are lifted from the shadows. In 2018, Operabyrån received the Guldkvast award from KVAST – the Association of Swedish Women Composers – because “with several excellent stage and opera performances of music by and about female composers from the Baroque period, they have contributed to adjusting music history.”

Barbara Strozzi was one of Italy’s most significant composers of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Monteverdi. She was known as “La virtuosissima cantatrice” – the masterful singer – and she grew up as an illegitimate daughter among the Venetian cultural elite, where she hobnobbed with philosophers, authors and poets, and discussed the meaning of life, love and music. A contradictory and exciting destiny is presented in this anniversary concert framed by a modern dancer who, in symbiosis with musicians and singers, creates a poetic whole.

The anniversary concert presents Strozzi’s incredibly beautiful and dramatic music beside other contemporary composers, such as Antonio Bertali, Dario Castello and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger.