Page 83 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

Da Vinci is credited with envisaging what became the helicopter, and likewise he
came up with designs for musical instruments. “They remain a combination of
studied scientific improvements and impossible dreams – they can’t be made or
played – but they still exercise a fascination over us today, even if they occupied

only a fraction of his sketchbooks,” says Delma.

Da Vinci knew how to sing and play an instrument. "We know he was musical,
and though there is no music by da Vinci to celebrate, we can celebrate the music

he would have heard being played,” says Delma.

"His professional life would have brought him into close contact with some of the
greatest composers of his day, and as part of the cultural set he would have heard
the best of the new music.You can't help but imagine he would have found that

extraordinary."

This year's festival reflects how innovation has always made an impact in music.
"We're celebrating music that pushed back boundaries, just as we do now," says

Delma. "Early Music is definitely not something that just sits in aspic."

A case in point is the involvement of Key Stage 2 pupils, aged eight to ten, from
Heworth School, who have been creating a response to Monteverdi's opera
L'Orfeo with the NCEM's education consultant, Cathryn Dew, and Indian Moon

Theatre puppeteer Anna Ingleby, who runs the Beverley Puppet Festival. The
resulting hour-long performance, Into The Underworld, opens the festival on
Friday at the NCEM at 1.30pm.

Monteverdi masters I Fagiolini return to the festival under Robert Hollingworth's
musical directorship to present a creative staging of this 400 year-old opera,
combining singing, acting and puppetry, at the sold-out Lyons on Friday at
7.30pm. The work merges the new world of baroque vocal expression with the

older Renaissance traditions of court entertainment and madrigal, a mixture of
the novel and the unfamiliar.

Festival favourites the Rose Consort of Viols play the NCEM on Saturday at1pm;

Alamire perform Thomas Tallis's Songs Of The Reformation at St Michael le
Belfrey Church, Saturday, 7.30pm; fortepiano player Andreas Staier focuses on A
New Touch at the NCEM, July 8, 8.45pm; The Sixteen's 40th anniversary is

marked with their Choral Pilgrimage 2019, combining a cappella music past and

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