“By the seventeenth century, musical works were already circulating throughout Europe. The libraries of German courts and churches housed Monteverdi’s madrigals, the great Venetian sacred masterpieces and Roman polyphonic collections. At the same time, the Thirty Years’ War profoundly reshaped the German lands and transformed their musical landscape.

It is within this context that the programme imagines the journey of a young German musician unable to leave his own town, yet longing to hear the world.

Vertigo is born of this dual reality: the vertigo of an ever-expanding musical world, and that of a society haunted by the memory of war. On the one hand, the polychoral architecture, spatial effects and sonic splendour inherited from Venice; on the other, more intimate forms—small sacred concertos, lamentiand prayers—emerging from a world left fragile.

The programme unfolds as a set of imaginary Vespers. Without seeking historical reconstruction, it follows a shared horizon: that of an age of hope, sustained by the memory of the past and by the determination not to repeat the tragedies that had marked these generations.” (Raphaël Pichon)