Hana BLAŽÍKOVÁ | soprano, harp

COLLEGIUM MARIANUM
Jana SEMERÁDOVÁ | flutes, artistic director
Lenka TORGERSEN | Baroque violin
Vojtěch SEMERÁD | Baroque violin and viola
Hana FLEKOVÁ | viola da gamba
Kateřina GHANNUDI | Baroque triple harp
Ján PRIEVOZNÍK | violone
Jan KREJČA | theorbo
Filip HRUBÝ | positive organ

The Lily Among Thorns concert introduces listeners to the world of early Baroque music in the Kingdom of Bohemia in several contrasting ways. Refined musical virtuosity, and not only instrumental, combines with the simple but compelling lyrical poetics of strophic songs by the knight Adam Václav Michna of Otradovice. He dedicated Czech Marian Music, his first collection of songs (1647), to Marian veneration.

Unlike Michna, both Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and his equally accomplished colleague Samuel Capricornus, a native of Žerčice near Mladá Boleslav, were Baroque cosmopolitans. Vincenzo Albrici also travelled across Europe before spending the last eight years of his life as an organist in Prague.

This diverse programme gives us an insight into the piety, poetry and instrumental virtuosity of those times, represent both settled composers and globetrotters, Czechs and Italians, and, like a Baroque painting with its chiaroscuro contrasts, bring out in their various interconnections the very best aspects of their creative work.