La dolce vista

The Sollazzo Ensemble brings together artists with a passion for medieval and early Renaissance music, nevertheless, they also have experience with jazz, contemporary and folk music. All this is reflected in the ensemble’s unique interpretation which unites an endeavour to achieve the greatest expressivity and authenticity, supported by familiarity with period sources. “It is not just a question of technical brilliance, but just as much that sense of engagement with both the audience as well as each other,” wrote The York Press. In their Prague Spring debut the group will present the programme La dolce vista (The Sweet Sight) with its subtitle The music of Francesco Landini, the blind organist of Florence.

“The sweetness of his melodies was such that hearts burst from their bosoms,” wrote loyal Florentine citizen Giovanni da Prato in 1389, describing Landini’s music in his book Paradiso degli Alberti. “The fame of Francesco Landini (c. 1335–1397) during his lifetime was already mythical: it was rumoured that the birds fell silent when he played on the organetto,” states the founder and artistic director of the Sollazzo Ensemble Anna Danilevskaia, describing Italy’s most important 14^th century composer. Landini is depicted with his organetto, a small pipe organ whose performer manipulates the bellows with one hand while he fingers the keys with the other, in his most famous portrait, which appears in the Codex Squarcialupi. “Payment records show that he was extremely well paid as an organ-builder and tuner, he was renowned for his poetry, for his intellectual views but, above all, it was for his compositional skills that he was truly admired. By all accounts, Landini was the most performed composer in Florence, and he was so versatile that his music could be enjoyed by all social strata,” Danilevskaia adds. His oeuvre, which survived in its most complete form in the Codex Squarcialupi, represents almost a quarter of all existing Italian music dating from the 14^th century. “The son of a painter, Francesco was only five when he lost his sight after being struck by smallpox. However, his lyrics, which he very probably wrote himself, are very descriptive. The leitmotif of the eyes, sometimes weeping, sometimes admiring, pervades his work, along with descriptions of colour, light and dark. Through this programme we endeavour to immerse ourselves in the “darkness” of Francesco Landini, in a universe rich in realistic detail and fanciful ideas, and to present the music of one of the most influential composers of the Middle Ages,” Danilevskaia concludes.

A performer on the medieval fiddle (fidula) and the Renaissance viola da gamba, Danilevskaia grew up in the French city of Metz surrounded by music. She established the Sollazzo Ensemble in 2014; since that time the ensemble has won a number of competitions, including the York Early Music Competition, where they also garnered the Audience Award and the prestigious Cambridge Early Music Prize. Their recordings have earned them various distinctions: Diapason d’Or, Gramophone magazine’s Editor’s Choice and also BBC Music Magazine’s Editor’s Choice. They appear in concert in Europe, the USA and in Asia. In 2023 the ensemble debuted at the Boston Early Music Festival and regularly collaborates with the Ambronay Festival and Oude Muziek d’Utrecht. As of 2024 Sollazzo is the Ensemble-in-Residence at the Arsenal Concert Hall in Metz and the Concertgebouw in Bruges.