Flores Musicae 2024 – Medieval and renaissance music festival

SOUNDS OF THE DECAMERON

ENSEMBLE PAMPINEA (Slovenia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Hong Kong)

Emilė Ribokaitė, voice

Maruša Brezavšček, recorder

Fiona Kizzie Lee, organ portative, flute and drum, double flute

Vojtěch Jakl, vielle

During her studies at the Mozarteum, the Barcelona School of Music and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Maruša Brezavšček, a young Slovenian virtuoso on the recorder, won numerous prizes at international competitions, performed as a soloist with various orchestras, and has just started teaching the recorder at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana. A few years ago, she founded the Pampinea Ensemble in Basel together with multi-instrumentalist Fiona Kizzie Lee.

Ensemble Pampinea, an award-winning early music ensemble, specialises in delivering well-researched concert programmes of Medieval and Renaissance music encouraging engagement from audience of all ages. Playing a wide range of period instruments including recorder, fiddle, pipe and tabor, double recorder, organetto and clavisimbalum, the ensemble aims to make early music approachable, playful and informative.

The members of the ensemble, Fiona Kizzie Lee, Maruša Brezavšček and Vojtěch Jakl, graduates of the early music institute Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, won the first prize of the 2022 London Early Music Young Ensemble Competition and were finalists of the 2023 Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci.

Recent performances of the group include the London International Festival for Early Music, Festival Seviqc Brežice, Kristalni Abonma and the Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht Fringe. Concert recordings of the ensemble have been broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 and Radio Slovenija. In its 2024 autumn concert season, the group will perform at the festivals Musica Cortese and Flores Musicae, as well as embarking on a concert tour in England.

The programme, which will be presented at the Flores Musicae festival in a quartet with Lithuanian singer Emilė Ribokaitė, is based around Boccaccio’s famous work of the same period, The Decameron, in which the protagonists, fleeing a plague epidemic, take refuge in a villa on the outskirts of Florence, where they tell each other different stories.