Música Antigua de Albuquerque will present “Creatures Great & Small,” a concert of rarely-heard medieval and Renaissance music performed with voices and period instruments. This program will be about real and imagined beasties in music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and will include selections from all across Europe. Some of the more fantastic animals in medieval bestiaries were the unicorn, dragon and basilisk, a mythical poisonous reptile often depicted as a hybrid of a snake with a cock’s body and wings. And there was also the phoenix, the mythical bird that lived for 500 years, and then immolated itself on its own funeral pyre and rose again from the ashes. Música Antigua’s concert will also feature music about many real animals. Birds were a favorite topic for medieval and Renaissance composers and chief among them were the nightingale, the swan and the cuckoo, whose call was very easily imitated in music. Some others that will appear on the program are the playful magpie and the mournful turtledove, plus an eagle, some chickens, and three black ravens. Audiences will also encounter some really small members of the animal kingdom, including the flea, the cricket and the fly, as well as some rarer ones in the literature, like the crocodile, the salamander, and a little mouse who is something of a gourmet but has to make do with moldy bread and radishes instead of the sausages and ravioli that he prefers. The performers of Música Antigua are Hovey Corbin, Dennis Davies-Wilson, Ruth Helgeson, Curtis Storm, Colleen Sheinberg and Art Sheinberg. The program will be performed with historic instruments, including recorders, shawms, crumhorns, cornemusen, lute, violas da gamba, vielle, rebec, harp, ranket, sackbut, gemshorn and medieval harp.
