Edition workshop at the Academy of Music / University of Zagreb in April 2024

For the edition of Penelope, over 600 pages of manuscript had to be transcribed, compared with the other contemporary sources and prepared for practical use. The edition was produced collaboratively by 22 students and professors at GMPU Klagenfurt and the Academy of Music / University of Zagreb. In April 2024, a workshop with Ramona Hocker took place in Zagreb as part of an Erasmus+ staff exchange programme. After an insight into the work and its contexts as well as an introduction into the sources, the notation as well as philological and technical basics, the students were invited to experience for themselves how the materials were created in the 18th century by copying with quill and ink. After this short journey back in time, the editing work on the Penelope began – thanks to the Zagreb team, the edition grew by four more numbers in just two days.

A detailed report has been published on the GMPU news platform Notes.

Photo: © Magda Galić

"Play Baroque!" Violin workshop with Fritz Kircher in June 2024

The individual part for the instruments, prepared in the summer semester 2024, were used for the first time in a string workshop in mid-June. Our concertmaster Fritz Kircher familiarised the GMPU students with historical string instruments and taught them the principles of Baroque playing techniques. The first sounds from the Penelope were already very promising and aroused curiosity about a highly nuanced work in which Conti integrates different styles from the Italian representative Baroque to emotive characters to string quartet sounds that foreshadow the early Haydn. He also uses the different styles to characterise the particular situations and the emotional states of the individual characters.

Photo: © Ramona Hocker

Workshops for baroque singing, baroque violin, baroque cello and historical dance in october 2024

Since the start of the 2024/25 winter term, Conti's Penelope has been coming to life piece by piece: Rehearsals are starting! The PENELOPE 2025 team, now extended and completed with students from Venice, started with four workshops lasting several days led by experts in baroque music (see also the report in the GMPU news blog). In the singing workshop with Ulrike Hofbauer (4/5 October 2024), intensive work was conducted on recitatives as well as ornamentation and colouratura in the arias. A special focus was placed on the methods and possibilities of musically portraying the specific character of a phrase in a lively and distinctive way. Ulrike Hofbauer also provided valuable technical advice, for example on fast colouraturas, articulation and the challenging low (castrato) parts.

Photos: © R. Hocker

Fritz Kircher worked with the violins and violas on the stormy instrumental sinfonia and the first version of most of the arias, which are very different in character. Meanwhile, Peter Trefflinger rehearsed the continuo parts of the recitatives and arias with the cellos. At the end of the intensive multi-day workshop, the high and low strings came together for the first time: The mutual dialogue and interaction of the (on the paper) sometimes quite unspectacular motifs create a lively listening experience and enjoyable music-making – in the course of the rehearsals, the singers will join in the action as further dialogue partners. 

Photo: © R. Hocker

In addition to questions of technique and intonation, the (re-)tuning of the historical instruments (to 415 Hz, of course) was a frequently practised activity that was a favourite of everyone, as well as putting on new strings when necessary and fine-tuning unruly (viola) pegs.

Fotos: © R. Hocker

Baroque music thrives on movement and rhythm! The dancer and baroque violinist Mojca Gal conveyed this with a great amount of creativity in the dance workshop. A historically inspired choreography was worked out for one of the dances from Penelope, and the dancers also learnt the principles of baroque gestures and step sequences on stage. Everyone involved also enjoyed the pantomime performances of another dance movement from our opera, which were finally presented on the stage of Mittlerer Saal. 

Fotos: © R. Hocker

Concert with baroque chamber music, 9. october 2024

During the three and a half days of workshops, everyone was captivated by the baroque sounds - while the workshops required intensive work and concentration, we were able to enjoy "Kaiser Karl's chamber music" during the lecturers' concert. Mojca Gal, Fritz Kircher (baroque violins), Peter Trefflinger (baroque cello) and Giulia Nuti (harpsichord) presented a colourful programme with works by Conti's colleagues Antonio Caldara, Gottlieb Muffat, Johann Joseph Fux, Giovanni Antonio Piani, Antonio Maria Bononcini and Antonio Vivaldi.

Photo: © R. Hocker