The Vilnius-based early music ensemble Canto Fiorito, directed by Rodrigo Calveyra, started its activities in 2013. The ensemble is dedicated to researching and performing Renaissance and Baroque music, with special attention paid to music from the first half of the 17th century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Italian musicians who lived in the region, and local composers who were strongly influenced by them, are the core of the ensemble’s musical activity. Canto Fiorito became one of the most active early music ensemble in the country soon after its establishment, contributing continuously to early music education in Lithuania, organising educational concerts, lectures, seminars and master-classes for children, students, teachers, and many other people.
In 2014, Canto Fiorito released a CD with music by Giovanni Battista Cocciola, a composer who lived in 17th-century Vilnius, on which most of the tracks were world premières. In 2015 and 2016, the ensemble presented the Lithuanian musical heritage in Norway, Austria and Slovenia, collaborating with Norwegian Cornetts and Sackbuts and Musica Antiqua Salzburg. The artistic director Rodrigo Calveyra initiated the International Kretinga Early Music Festival in 2017, organised by Canto Fiorito and dedicated to the oldest organ in Lithuania (1680). In the same year, Canto Fiorito presented the première of the earliest surviving German opera, Johann Sebastiani’s Pastorello musicale, the manuscript of which was found in a Vilnius library, and was invited to perform in the Stockholm Early Music Festival Christmas Edition.
The year 2018 marked a huge international development in Canto Fiorito’s activities: the ensemble was invited to present the Lithuanian musical heritage at Festival Musiq’3 in Brussels and the Namur Music Festival in Belgium; it performed in the Nordic Medieval Music Festival in Sweden; and it implemented the huge European musical and educational project ‘The Hanseatic Way’, together with eMusica Antiqua Salzburg, with concerts in Vilnius and Kaunas, and at the Brighton Early Music Festival (UK), the Hanseatic Days in Rostock (Germany), the Jeunesse Festival in Vienna, the Glasperlenspiel Festival in Tartu (Estonia), and the Bach Chamber Music festivals in Riga and Amsterdam.
In 2019, Canto Fiorito presented the première of Alessandro Stradella’s opera La Circe, it initiated a series of concerts dedicated to the master of Vilnius Baroque architecture Johann Christoph Glaubitz together with the Polish early music ensemble Nova Silezia, and it started a three-year residence in Kintai, where it organises early music master-classes for music school pupils and teachers, educational concerts for children, joint projects with local choirs and folk ensembles, and other activities.
