To celebrate 10 years of Musica Antica in 2026, in December 2025 we will be recording our first album of previously unrecorded and long-unperfomed music from 1650s Venice.

 

This will be the first recording to reproduce the exact instrumentation used according to surviving payment records from the 17th century. We are fortunate that seven account books survive for opera seasons between 1651 and 1668, furnishing us with the number and type of instruments used, and in one case specifying that one of the two keyboards used was a spinetta, the term most commonly applied to the pentagonal virginal. With this in mind, our band includes two violins, bass viol, two theorbos, harpsichord and pentagonal virginal.

 

Often, the contemporary approach to Venetian music of this period has been shaped either by a fear of 'timbral monotony', with recorders, cornets, organs and harps added to diversify accompanying ensembles, or by cost, leaving a single keyboardist and lutenist in the pit. Our approach provides us with an opportunity to experiment with continuo realisation and ornamentation in order to find variety, and provide the most affective accompaniment of voices with the instruments we know were present in the public opera houses of the 1650's. At every turn, our approach will be informed by treatises on the voice, ornamentation and continuo realisation from the seventeenth century.

Mezzo soprano Camilla Seale and countertenor Tristram Cooke will be our prima donna and primo uomo, with the repertoire including arias and duets from operas by Lucio, Il Rovettino and P.A Ziani - all of whose music is rarely heard today - as well as by Francesco Cavalli and his most famous student, Barbara Strozzi. Much of this, including a cantata by Cavalli that may have served as a model for Strozzi's most famous cantatas, has never been recorded, and some of this music has not been performed since the seventeenth century.

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Excerpts of our work will be available online from early 2026, with the full album due to be released in 2027. Fundraising for recording and production (a total of £17,000) has been completed, but any future donations we receive towards the project will go towards touring the programme around the UK. You can donate via the window below, or by writing to us at info@musicaantica.org.uk.

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