"Zefiro torna" by Claudio Monteverdi

Arianna Aerie & Samantha Arten, sopranos
Sarah Bereza, harpsichord
Jeffrey Noonan, Baroque guitar
Early Music Missouri concluded its 2023 -2024 season with a concert featuring music for three female voices, drawing on the music of the famed "concerto delle donne" and their imitators.
Arguably the most important composer of the early Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643) composed in nearly every genre of the new century but remains best known for his forward-looking madrigals and groundbreaking contributions to the development of opera. Composed over the course of his long career, his nine books of madrigals effectively synthesized the new principles of setting poetry, a style Monteverdi referred to as "seconda pratica" or a new style of music. Thirty years after "L’Orfeo," Monteverdi again altered the course music history with his late opera "L’incoronazione di Poppea," one of the greatest dramatic works of the seventeenth century.
One of Monteverdi’s many ciaconnas,“ Zefiro torna” was composed for two tenors. Monteverdi employs the insistent chords and bass to reinforce the song's theme, the return of Spring on gentle breezes. The two singers toss virtuosic lines back and forth, reflecting the stylistic innovations Luzzasco Luzzaschi developed when composing for the original "concerto delle donne." Monteverdi also employs the newly-invented recitative to dramatic effect in this song. “Zefiro torna” features two wrenching recitatives that bring the protagonist and listeners back down to earth, literally and figuratively.
Since moving to St. Louis over a decade ago, Arianna Aerie (soprano) has established herself as one of the city’s finest and most versatile singers. She earned a B.A. from Oberlin College with vocal studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, continuing her training with Martile Rowland at Colorado’s Opera Theatre of the Rockies. Her studies then took Arianna to North Carolina where she worked with Marion Pratnicki of UNC School of the Arts. Arianna’s vocal versatility has earned her accolades as a performer of Early Music and opera, as well as in classical, musical theatre and jazz. She spent several years touring nationally with the Oikos Jazz Ensemble and has shared the stage with local jazz legends Kim Massie, Carol Beth True, Kim Fuller Barnes and others.
Arianna currently serves as a soloist and section leader at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church and has performed as a featured soloist with the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus, Bach Society of Saint Louis and Collegium Vocale of Saint Louis. She appeared with Early Music Missouri in 2019 in a performance of The Green Knight, in 2021 with Musicke’s Cordes singing 17th-century German cantatas and in a 2022 concert of Monteverdi’s sacred music. Some of Arianna’s recent favorite performances include soprano soloist in Aaron Copland’s “In the Beginning” and soprano soloist in Ingvar Lidholm’s “a riveder le stele (a river of stars)”. When not performing, Arianna works in local sustainable agriculture and sings lots of silly songs with her husband and two young children.
Music historian and performer Samantha Arten (soprano) has focused her performance activities in Early Music, singing primarily in liturgical church choirs and Baroque ensembles. She is a principal singer with the Bach Society of St. Louis and the St. Louis Women’s Chorus and staff singer at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Samantha has been actively involved with Early Music Missouri since its start, creating one of our early concerts and appearing on no fewer than four concerts this season. In past years, she has performed as soloist with the Raleigh Bach Soloists, the Duke Vespers Ensemble, the Byrd Festival Consort, Musicke’s Cordes, St. Louis Baroque, Collegium Vocale St. Louis and the Southeast Baroque Ensemble. A founding member of Bull City Baroque and Concentus Carolina, Samantha directed the Duke Collegium Musicum (2016) and the children’s choir at First Presbyterian Church of Durham, NC (2015-2018). Her women’s barbershop quartet, Ringtones, won their international competition (Harmony, Incorporated) in 2010.
Samantha holds the Ph.D. in musicology from Duke University (2018) and a B.Mus. in music history and literature from Washington University in St. Louis (2011). She teaches as a Lecturer in Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and Maryville University, and serves as a faculty affiliate with Saint Louis University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her research focuses on sixteenth-century English music printing in the context of Reformation theology and book history. Her scholarly work can be found in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Early Music, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts, and Reformation. She is co-editing Elizabethan and Jacobean Praises of Music with Katherine Butler, and completing her first monograph, Reading The Whole Booke of Psalmes.
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