Seconda Pratica (NL)

Seconda Pratica (NL):

Nuno Atalaia: traverso, recorder, artistic direction

Asuka Sumi: violin

Sofia Pedro:soprano

Sophia Patsi: alto

Emilio Aguilar: tenor

Joao Paixao: bass

Jonatan Alvarado: tenor, baroque guitar

Julie Stalder: viola da gamba, double-bass

Fernando Aguado: harpsichord

Founded in 2012 by student’s of the Amsterdam and The Hague Conservatory’s, Seconda Pratica has continously tried to bridge the gaps between times, audiences and disciplines, through its work with the repertoire of Western music of the XVII and XVIII centuries. Our approach is constantly inter-disciplinary, multimedia and cross-institutional. We have worked with theater groups (Teatro OBando, and the European Network Platform11+), universities (The Hague Academy for the Arts and Leiden University), and cultural institutions (Institut Franco-Portugais, Maison Descartes, The Hague GuestCard), always concerned with drawing lines of dialogue between them established through the music we explore and perform. The name Seconda Pratica is at a same time an homage to the founding figure of Claudio Monteverdi but also a mission statement - to engage with historic repertoire in a revitalizing way without ever losing sight of our inevitable modernity. The same way that Seconda Pratica in the XVII century stood apart from the mainstream musical tradition, so do musicians such as ourselves, engaging with the Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement, face the constant labeling of either eccentrics or purists by the broader musical establishment. As a response to this tendency, Seconda Pratica proposes a mix of scholarly rigor and artistic playfulness, in order to allow both audience and repertoire to enter a creative dialogue in each of our concerts.

The group’s raison d’être, is based on a constant reinvention of the conventional concert practices to draw both the public’s attention but also our own curiosity into finding new ways of making music. This translates in presentations raging from commented concerts, small stagings, cross-media shows and mixtures of different repertoire in order to bring to light the particular features of the art works we perform. For this reason, as an ensemble we have participated in residences and workshops with Europe’s leading theater companies on stage and body presence, trying to build bridges between established musical principles and new schools of physical expressivity. From already established classics of the baroque (Bach’s Orchestral Suites) to lesser known repertoire, otherwise forgotten (Dutch premiere of excerpts Rousseau’s “Le Dévin du Village”, World premiere of Charpentier Intermezzis), the eclecticism of our choices is as much a reaction to our ever changing cultural market, as it is inspired by the effervescent music life of the XVII and XVIII centuries. We have managed to bring on stage three different programs of music expanding each with an extra-musical investigation be it a full theatrical staging (Le sommeil de Molière, July 2013), a series of essays on the effeverscent pamphlet war of the Querelle des Bouffon (Rameau parmi les Bouffons, May 2012), or a distilation of the rhetorical scheme behind the French tragedy form (Tragédie de Poche: Les Passions, February 2013).