This year 2024 we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Early Music Festival ‘La Vila del Joy’. We are very happy with the faithful following of the public that year after year has been filling the different spaces destined to the concerts of groups that have made us travel through the Middle Ages, both Christian and Al-Andalus, the rich Renaissance, the contrasts of the Baroque, the striking Classicism and the early Salon Romanticism interpreted with criteria and period instruments. In this year's edition, the Church of Santa Maria and the Assumption, a 16th century Gothic building, will be the setting for five concerts by groups which have made a name for themselves on the international early music scene, to which we will add three conferences in the Vilamuseu in collaboration with the Seu Universitària de la Vila Joiosa of the Universitat d’Alacant, conferences in which different specialists will talk to us about the historical context of the different concert programmes.

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    The opening of the festival will take place on FRIDAY 20th September, when we will hear a recital by the Catalan mezzo-soprano Marta Infante together with the baroque orchestra Vespres d'Arnadí, conducted by Dani Espasa and Pere Saragossa. This ensemble will present the programme Nel profondo cieco mondo, composed of virtuoso works by the Venetian Antonio Vivaldi and Domènec Terradellas, a Catalan who in the mid-18th century, after training with the maestro Francesc Valls, completed his training in Naples, where he premiered oratorios and operas, a career he continued with success in the theatres of Rome, Venice and London.

 

    On THURSDAY 26th September it will be the turn of the Italian group Orfeo Futuro, who will present the programme Burrasche e Bizzarrie, a representative programme of the golden age of Neapolitan musical theatre, showing the splendour of opera seria, the amusing interludes, the instrumental music impregnated with the spirit of the opera seria, the instrumental music impregnated with the spirit of the opera seria, the fun interludes, the instrumental music impregnated with the spirit of the opera seria and the fun interludes, instrumental music impregnated with an intense theatrical flavour, mixing cultured and popular elements, virtuosity and singable melodies, improvisation and counterpoint through the great composers of that Kingdom, such as Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Vinci, Matteis or Jommelli. On the same day in the Vilamuseu, the first of the conferences will be given by Joan Carles Gomis Corell, Doctor in musicology and professor at the Conservatori Superior de Música de Castelló, and Josep-David Garrido i Valls, Doctor in History, who will talk about the musical relationship between the kingdoms of Naples and Valencia from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

 

    On FRIDAY 27th September, the same group Orfeo Futuro will perform a programme dedicated to the Easter music of the Kingdom of Naples in the 18th century, discovering a collection of unjustly unknown composers such as Gaetano Veneziano, Domenico Sarri and Pasquale Cafaro. This programme is entitled Stabat Mater and will feature an ensemble led by the soprano Carmela Osato and the contralto Antonia Salzano, under the direction of Pierfrancesco Borrelli on the organ, with a line-up of two violins, viola, viola da gamba, violone, baroque guitar and theorbo.

 

    On FRIDAY 4 October we have a proposal from one of the most authoritative voices in medieval music in Europe, Paloma Gutiérrez del Arroyo González: Factum est silentium. The programme presented aims to revisit the Apocalypse of St. John through the medieval imaginary, performing repertoire from manuscripts from the 9th to 15th centuries preserved in libraries and archives in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, France and Spain. Paloma will be accompanied by the prestigious Galician harpist Manuel Vilas Rodríguez and the Valencian multi-instrumentalist Efrén López. The day before, 3 October, we will be able to attend the conference given by Paloma Gutiérrez herself, who, as well as specialising in medieval music, is a doctor in biophysics and will talk to us about the context of the concert programme.

 

    The closing concert of the festival will be on WEDNESDAY 9th October, in which we will be able to listen to the Cor de Cambra Ad Libitum, winner of the Gran Premio Nacional de Canto Coral 2023, together with the Renaissance group Lucentum XVI. In this concert they will present Strela do dia, a programme focusing on the presence of women in various songbooks from the 13th century to the present day. The concert will start with a selection of cantigas of Sancta Maria by Alfons the Wise and will go through different collections of medieval, renaissance and early baroque polyphony, with works by excellent female composers such as Maddalena Casulana, Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi. The leap from the 17th century to the present day is made with a newly created motet commissioned from the festival to Pedro Salinas Robles. His work is inspired by Como gradecer ben feito, a cantiga that narrates the stay of Alfonso X in the city of Requena in August 1273 to meet King Jaume I. The cantiga explains how Alfonso became seriously ill and how Saint Mary miraculously healed him and freed him from death. On TUESDAY 8th October we will be able to attend the last of the conferences which will be given by Ignacio Latorre Zacarés, History graduate and municipal archivist of Requena, who will talk about the historical events narrated in the cantiga Como gradecer ben feito, and by Pedro Salinas as the author of the motet inspired by that cantiga.