Swiss Early Music Ensemble Will Play The Music of Da Vinci

La Morra. Photo credit: Dirk Letsch

Amidst the explosion of artistic accomplishment during the Italian Renaissance, debate raged as to which art form was superior. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew a thing or two about the subject, weighed in on the side of painting. But he went further, comparing painting to poetry and music. “And in shaping corporeal things,” he wrote, “the poet is much less able than the painter, and for invisible things less able than the musician.”

The music that influenced Leonardo’s view is the focus of Shaping the Invisible, a program to be performed Saturday, Feb. 24 by the Switzerland-based early music ensemble La Morra along with guest lutenist Nigel North. The concert is presented by Early Music Now and will include music by Domenico da Piacenza, Giovanni Serragli, Henricus Issac and Francesco Canova da Milano.

Considered one of Europe’s leading ensembles performing music from the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods, La Morra was founded in 2000. Its players, “a melting pot of international temperaments,” perform on Renaissance harpsichord, recorder, lute, viol, and voice. Early Music Review describes the group’s playing and singing as “superbly idiomatic, expressive and technically impeccable.”

La Morra founder Michal Gondko, who shares artistic director duties with Corina Marti, describes Leonardo as a musical man. “Not only was he interested in the science of acoustics; he also designed musical instruments, played the lute (well enough to teach others) and accompanied himself, while singing, on the lira da braccio,” a bowed string instrument. Leonardo spent most of his life in Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome, all places teaming with musical innovation in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

Much of the repertoire La Morra will perform is available today because of a critical technological development that occurred in 1501. Ottaviano Petrucci, a publisher in Venice, devised a technique to print polyphonic music using movable type. The staff, notes, and lyrics were added to the paper during three separate press passes, creating a meticulous and lasting roadmap for the musicians. Compositions no longer needed to be passed down orally or transcribed by hand. Printed music could be shared across borders and across time.

Over two decades, Petrucci published some 60 volumes of sacred and secular works for vocalists and instrumentalists. La Morra’s program includes selections from Petrucci’s 11 books of Italian secular songs known as frottole. The group also will perform a five-part piece composed by Pope Leo X, a member of the Medici family who “had a fine ear and a melodious voice, [and] loved music to the pitch of fanaticism” according to Papal biographer Ludwig von Pastor.

La Morra will share the music of Leonardo’s time in Italy at 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 24, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 914 E. Knapp St. A pre-concert talk will begin at 4 p.m. Tickets are available online and at the venue on the day of the concert beginning at 3:45 p.m. Free parking is available in the Lincoln Center for the Arts school lot across Marshall Street, and on the street near the church.