She Broke All Ten Commandments for Love…and Didn't Regret It!

Piffaro, The Renaissance Band has teamed with Damon Bonetti, co-founding artistic director of Philadelphia Artists' Collective, to create a program that intersperses music and text to evoke the passion, drama, and humor of an evening in a Golden Age Spanish Theater. Inspired by the heroine of the romance La Bella Celia, who broke all Ten Commandments for love...and didn't regret it. Performances take place on February 24, 25, and 26 in Philadelphia and Wilmington. Tickets are $29-49 (youth and full-time students free with ID) and are available at www.piffaro.org or by calling 215-235-8469.

The program was created by Piffaro's Christa Patton and opens with the beautiful Celia confessing startling news to her priest: she has broken all Ten Commandments for love. The musicians, along with actors J Hernandez and Amanda Robles, then commence probing that dangerous and delightful emotion as it was understood by composers and playwrights of 17th century Spain.

The second half of the program ruminates upon the Sixth Commandment (Thou shalt not kill) and the dark, sensuous aspects of love. It reaches its climax with Muere Corazón, a song that exemplifies the musical motif of someone dying of love. It describes lovers caught in the height of passion and being carried away, lost to themselves. In the end, la bella Celia does not repent of her actions.

Guest artists on this program include one of the nation's rare countertenors, Drew Minter; soprano and "national artistic treasure" Julianne Baird (New York Times); J Hernandez, winner of the Phindie Critics Choice Award for Best Performance by a Supporting Actor; and Amanda Robles, a New York-based University of the Arts graduate.

Spanish artists proudly refused to adopt foreign fads whole cloth, instead developing a unique indigenous style of their own. Musical selections include ballad-like romances, liturgical music (the Church permeated Spanish life), dances, secular "pop" songs known as tonos humanos, and music composed for the stage by composers like Juan Hidalgo, harpist at the court of Philip IV and father of Spanish opera. All of the musical forces that found their way onto the Spanish stage will be present at this concert: harp (king of instruments in Spain), guitar, shawms to sound the blazing glory of the Spanish Church, and choirs of dulcians, whose name literally means "sweet."

Texts from plays by Lope De Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Pedro Calderón have been selected by Bonetti, whose Philadelphia Artists' Collective specializes in rarely performed classical plays. Excerpts will be interspersed with music and spoken in Spanish with English supertitles.

"¡Ay Amor!" marks the third in Piffaro's series of Renaissance Spanish music from the Old and New Worlds. The season began with "The Musical World of Don Quixote," and will continue in March and April with "Sacred Wind" (cathedral music for a Spanish band).