Freeing the Muse explores Renaissance ideas of female beauty as shaped by women themselves. Bringing together solo songs and five-voice madrigals by Maddalena Casulana, Raphaella Alleotti and Francesca Caccini, the programme places female creativity firmly at its centre, revealing composers who wrote, performed and shaped musical culture in their own time.
These works are set alongside madrigals by Giaches de Wert, Cipriano de Rore and Luzzasco Luzzaschi; music forged in close dialogue with exceptional female singers, whose virtuosity and expressive power transformed the sound of late-sixteenth-century Italy. Here, the “muse” is not a silent ideal but an active presence, inspiring innovation through collaboration.
Fieri celebrates the boldness, imagination and artistic authority of women whose individual voices resound throughout this remarkable repertoire.