Early Music Now Presents Galileo’s Daughters

Early Music Now embraces this season’s theme(Across BordersAcross Time) with an enveloping grasp in its first concert ofthe season, highlighted by the appearance of New York City-based Galileo’sDaughters. This trio (Sarah Pillow, Mary Anne Ballard and Ronn McFarlane)found inspiration in former New York Times science reporter Dava Sobel’sbook Galileo’s Daughter, and in so doing strives, as they say, to “bringalive through music and readings the era of Suor Maria Celeste, whose lettersto her famous father make vivid the spiritual and daily life of a 17th-centurywoman.”

The first half of the concert, titled “PerpetualMotion: Revolutions in 17th-Century Science & Music,” consists ofvariegated works of the Italian Renaissance apropos to this theme. Worksinclude “Juno at the Plain of the Erymanthus River” from the opera LaCalisto by Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), “Lamento d’Arianna” from the lostopera Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), “Vestiva i colli” byVincenzo Galilei (1520-91), the famous astronomer’s father, and works byFrescobaldi, Purcell and others.

The second half of the concert, as Early Music NowDirector Charles Q. Sullivan explains, “will be a brief survey of the musical scopeof the three musicians, including some of Ronn McFarlane’s music from hisGrammy-nominated crossover CD.”

At the Helene Zelazo Center on the campus ofUW-Milwaukee on Sept. 26.