Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine at the 2025 Barokkfest Early Music Festival

At the medieval Vår Frue Church, the musicians of the acclaimed period-instrument Orkester Nord join eight impeccable vocal soloists and the Vox Nidrosiensis ensemble to demonstrate the timeless urgency of an epochal masterpiece. A seminal work at the crossroads of the Renaissance and the Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) is one of the earliest monuments of sacred music ever composed, and likely the most significant before Bach, blending new and old styles and drawing on a variety of Latin liturgical texts. This lavish production, led by Orkester Nord's founder Martin Wåhlberg for the 2025 Barokkfest Early Music Festival in Trondheim, Norway, brings Monteverdi's 17th-century Italian melodies to light up the 21st-century Nordic night with the vivid emotions and great virtuosity of the work's 13 sections, culminating in a stupendous Magnificat.