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Monteverdi String Band
The Monteverdi String Band are a wonderful example of a group of talented, passionate musicians who all seem to relish putting their virtuosity on display, but who also clearly enjoy playing as a tight, beautifully-balanced ensemble.
The result was a fascinating series of highlights of quite how flexible the form could be, and how later composers could build on and ornament the work of earlier. The highlight, for me however, had to be Ely's account of La Musica's solo from Orfeo.
Early Music
Instrumentation
- Oliver Webber - violin, viola
- Theresa Caudle - violin, viola
- Wendi Kelly - viola
- David Brooker - tenor viola
- Mark Caudle - bass violin
Repertoire
Principally 17th century repertoire for strings, sometimes including voice and continuo. Programmes vary in size typically from 2 or 3 to 7 musicians (occasionally more for some special projects).
Sample programmes:
Con Arte e Maestria (2 players): Virtuoso ornamentation from the dawn of the Italian Baroque for violin & continuo. (Rore, A Gabrieli, Bovicelli, Rognoni, Marini)
The Madrigal Reimagined (7 musicians - sop. Hannah Ely, lute, 5 strings): A celebration of the Italian madrigal & the creativity it inspired, illuminated by contemporary readings. (G Gabrieli, Bovicelli, Monteverdi, Caccini)
See https://www.monteverdistringband.com/programmes.html for other programmes
Biography
The Monteverdi String Band takes its inspiration from the sound, style and repertoire of the early violin consort, using seventeenth-century equipment to create a unique sound, ‘quite unlike any that of any other ensemble I know that plays this music’ ¬(Planet Hugill).
Much of the band’s programming draws on the elaborate cultural milieu of early seventeenth-century Italy: the literary origins of the madrigal, the life of Galileo, and the private entertainments of the Venetian nobility have all inspired performances. They have collaborated with several opera productions at the Brighton Early Music Festival; the 2017 production of L’Orfeo, co-directed by MSB’s Oliver Webber, was praised for its ‘immediacy and vitality that I found breath-taking’ (The Argus), and 2023 saw further collaborations with the Taverner Consort (Monteverdi’s Vespers, Herrenchiemsee) and The City Musick (‘The Count and the Duke’, York Early Music Festival).
The ‘Monteverdi String Band in focus’ series offers smaller projects featuring individual ensemble members: in Con Arte e Maestria, Oliver Webber and Steven Devine explore virtuosic traditions of ornamentation. Released on Resonus Classics in 2021, it was described by Gramophone as ‘an intensely perfumed performance: beguiling then joyful, simple then suave’. They follow this with A Thousand Flexible Ways, for voice (Hannah Ely), violin and lute, in which the violin, following the advice of authors through the ages to ‘imitate the human voice’, takes on the roles of a second soprano in this exploration of dialogue and ornamentation in the age of meraviglia.
Projects for 2025–6 include ‘All Kinds of Rare Inventions’, an instrumental programme inspired by the thriving musical and literary landscape of Dresden in the seventeenth century, and a revival of their staging of Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.
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