Italian flautist Luisa Sello will perform with the Commandaria Orchestra of the Cyprus Wine Museum at Kolossi Castle on Sunday, 15 November, at 7pm, in a free concert as part of the Medieval Festival of the Municipality of Kourion.
The concert, titled ‘From Venice to Cyprus: Nature, Memory and Medieval Echoes’, will be conducted by the orchestra’s founder and artistic director, Francis Nectarios Guy. It draws on nature, folk tradition and historical memory to explore links between the music of Italy and Cyprus.
The programme moves from the Italian Baroque to modern and contemporary Italian and Cypriot music, with works by Antonio Vivaldi, Carlo Corazza, Alkis Baltas, Solon Michaelides and Valter Sivilotti.
It opens with two Vivaldi pieces, the Flute Concerto in F major, Op. 10, No. 5, and Il Gardellino (The Goldfinch), Op. 10, No. 3, whose flute imitates birdsong. Corazza’s Maravee (2015) is a suite on folk themes from Friuli, in north-eastern Italy. In the Friulian language, maravee means “wonder” or “amazement”.
Baltas’s Cypriot Suite, in its 1969 version for string orchestra, is based on traditional melodies from Theodoulos Kallinikos’s collection The Cypriot Folk Muse. It is paired with Michaelides’s At the Village Wedding (1934), a symphonic sketch for flute and strings. Michaelides was Baltas’s teacher, encouraged him to orchestrate the Cypriot Suite and conducted its first orchestral performance in 1969.
The evening closes with Sivilotti’s L’incantesimo della luna nuova (The Enchantment of the New Moon) from 2014. The works by Corazza and Sivilotti were both written for Sello.
The programme takes Venetian rule in Cyprus, from 1489 to 1571, as its historical starting point, although the music itself dates from the Baroque onwards.
The performers
Sello has worked with La Scala in Milan and with musicians including Riccardo Muti, Trevor Pinnock and Bruno Canino, and has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York. A student of Severino Gazzelloni and Alain Marion, she has taught at the conservatoires of Milan and Trieste and is involved in the doctoral programme in flute performance at New Bulgarian University in Sofia.
Guy, a Cypriot conductor and musicologist, holds two doctorates, in musicology and musical art and in orchestral and operatic conducting, from the National Academy of Music in Sofia and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He has conducted in Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and Poland, including at Sofia Music Weeks, the Varna Summer International Music Festival and Pafos 2017, European Capital of Culture.
The Commandaria Orchestra was founded in 2009 by the Cyprus Wine Museum and is based in Erimi. It has worked with the Sofia National Opera, Varna State Opera and the Comédie de Genève, with which it performed Michael Jarrell’s Cassandre, featuring Fanny Ardant.
The orchestra takes its name from the Great Commandery of Cyprus, which was centred on Kolossi Castle and is closely associated with Commandaria wine. The castle was the seat of the Knights Hospitaller’s Great Commandery of Cyprus.
The Medieval Festival celebrates the area’s historical heritage through music, storytelling and the performing arts, with Kolossi Castle and the Commandaria tradition at its heart.
