Early Music Now Presents Galileo’s Daughters

Early Music Now embraces this season’s theme (Across Borders—Across Time) with an enveloping grasp in its first concert of the season, highlighted by the appearance of New York City-based Galileo’s Daughters. This trio (Sarah Pillow, Mary Anne Ballard and Ronn McFarlane) found inspiration in former New York Times science reporter Dava Sobel’s book Galileo’s Daughter, and in so doing strives, as they say, to “bring alive through music and readings the era of Suor Maria Celeste, whose letters to her famous father make vivid the spiritual and daily life of a 17th-century woman.”

The first half of the concert, titled “Perpetual Motion: Revolutions in 17th-Century Science & Music,” consists of variegated works of the Italian Renaissance apropos to this theme. Works include “Juno at the Plain of the Erymanthus River” from the opera La Calisto by Francesco Cavalli (1602-76), “Lamento d’Arianna” from the lost opera Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), “Vestiva i colli” by Vincenzo Galilei (1520-91), the famous astronomer’s father, and works by Frescobaldi, Purcell and others.

The second half of the concert, as Early Music Now Director Charles Q. Sullivan explains, “will be a brief survey of the musical scope of the three musicians, including some of Ronn McFarlane’s music from his Grammy-nominated crossover CD.”

At the Helene Zelazo Center on the campus of UW-Milwaukee on Sept. 26.