About the Project
Adriaen Willaert was born in 1490 in Roeselare/Rumbeke, Belgium. After studying law in Leuven and at the Sorbonne in Paris, he turned to composition. He moved to Italy and worked in several cities, including Ferrara and Bologna, before eventually settling in Venice.
Willaert served as maestro di cappella of the St Mark’s Basilica in Venice for 35 years until his death and was regarded as one of the greatest composers and pedagogues of his time. His music quickly spread beyond Italy, thanks in part to advances in printing technology, and was performed at many of Europe’s most prestigious courts and cathedrals, including the Vatican. At the same time, numerous composers from regions such as Flanders, France, and Germany travelled to Italy to study with “Maestro Adriano” in La Serenissima or to become acquainted with his innovative compositional techniques.
It has been more than 500 years since Willaert’s music could be heard daily somewhere in
Europe, performed in churches and chapels. For centuries, the beautifully decorated choirbooks in which his masses and motets occupy a prominent place, as well as the printed partbooks containing some of the finest madrigals and chansons of the period, have remained largely silent.
With the new ensemble Dionysos Now!, Tore Tom Denys aims to bring Adriaen Willaert’s music out of Europe’s libraries and allow it to be heard once again.
Dionysos Now! was founded in Vienna by Tore Tom Denys from Roeselare, Belgium, and consists of six singers who perform Renaissance a cappella music. While 50% of the singers are based in Vienna, the main office of Dionysos Now! is located in Roeselare, Belgium, the hometown of both Adriaen Willaert and Tore Tom Denys.
Together with his colleagues, Denys aims to introduce audiences to the music of Adriaen Willaert (1490–1562), the great master of Flemish polyphony from Rumbeke, near Roeselare.
Tore Tom Denys deliberately takes a fresh and contemporary approach to interpreting Willaert’s music. Just as in the Renaissance, the goalis to perform this music in a way that allows it to be experienced as something new and vibrant by today’s listener.
“With Dionysos Now!, I wish to show that Renaissance vocal polyphony is wonderfully captivating music that deserves to be heard by a wider audience. We want to build cathedrals out of sounds, letting you experience the music as though you were flying far above those cathedrals with a drone.The individual bricks are all there, but they seem to merge together with the whole, into the gestalt: the radiant music generates much more effervescent energy than the sum of its tones, and the music’s contagious flow is sought and captured, like a surfer who seems to have found the perfect wave and seizes his chance to ride it before it again ebbs away…”
– Tore Tom Denys
“Adriaen Willaert’s little-known St John Passion is his only surviving setting of the Passion of Christ. With this recording, I want to demonstrate that a significant compositional innovation took place during the Renaissance, aiming to make the recitation of the Passion on Good Friday, which was traditionally sung in unison as Gregorian chant, more musically engaging. The Passion is composed in an innovative polyphonic yet homorhythmic style, where every voice sings the same text simultaneously. In this way, the text remains highly intelligible, while the listener is captivated by the manner in which the story is unfolds.
Not much is known about the northern Italian (Catholic, Latin) Passion tradition. Nevertheless, we know that it was highly popular during the High Renaissance and that it served as a precursor to the Passion settings that later became part of the Protestant tradition, ultimately reaching their peak in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
In Willaert’s St John Passion, all the roles are written polyphonically. The Evangelist is set for four voices, Jesus for three voices, and Pilate, the Maidservant (Ancilla), and Peter (Petrus) for two voices, while the crowd (turba) is scored for sic voices.
Following Willaert’s death, this work was most likely never performed again in its original form, as preserved in the manuscript partbooks rather than in printed editions. For a long time, scholars speculated that the Passion may have been composed by Cypriano de Rore, one of Willaert’s pupils. Today, however, musicologists are largely in agreement that the work should be attributed to Willaert.”
How do we support them?
The VGP Foundation’s support contributes to the following activities:
- Research at the Library of Bologna
- Editing the original manuscript into modern musical scores
- Rehearsing and recording the music
- Producing and distributing the music on CD, LP, and digital platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, iTunes, Apple Music, Quboz, and Tidal
- Developing a soundscape for the STAM Museum in Ghent
- Producing a documentary on the research conducted on the original manuscript in Bologna
- Organising a concert tour in 2024, including the world premiere at Bozar Brussels, a concert at deSingel Antwerp, and additional performances across Europe
