This performance will include the use of two original keyboard instruments from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Musica Antica Rotherhithe present music by Francesco Cavalli, Barbara Strozzi, Francesco Lucio, P.A. Ziani and Giovanni Legrenzi - much of it unheard for 370 years - from the golden age of Venetian opera.

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Using surviving payment records from Venetian theatres c. 1651 - 1668, our ensemble will match that which you might have seen in an orchestra pit in Venice during the 1650s: two violins, bass violin, a harpsichord, pentagonal virginal, and two theorbos. Using a wealth of historical music treatises, many aspects of our playing, from continuo realisation to ornamentation, attempt to match the sound you might heard as closely as possible.

We recorded this programme as La Decima Musa: Music from the golden age of Venetian opera 1650-1660 in December 2025, thanks to the generosity of our friends and supporters, the Orbis Pictus Foundation, and Angel Early Music. This first tour of the programme was made possible by The Continuo Foundation.
 

This concert will finish at 4:50pm. 

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This programme has been made possible by generous funding from the Continuo Foundation.

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