Introducing La Serenissima’s latest programme: Venice by Night

This new and innovative programme from La Serenissima lets the listener experience the various musical entertainments that were on offer in Venice during a typical eighteenth century evening.  Albinoni and Vivaldi rub shoulders with composers whose legacy has been more obscured by the mists of time, a fate also experienced by Vivaldi until a miraculous twentieth century revival put his music back on the map.

There is some fantastic music by lesser known composers starting with Carlo Francesco Pollarolo’s sinfonia to his opera La Vendetta d’Amore for trumpet and strings, a work that Grove claims is lost, yet survives complete in the library of the Royal Academy of Music, London.  Also featured is the wonderfully eccentric Fuga, o capriccio con quattro soggetti by Francesco Maria Veracini (famous for being shipwrecked in the English Channel and for jumping out of an upper storey window in a fit of madness — and surviving!) and Antonio Lotti’s motet Alma ride exulta mortalis, a work that survives in the hand of none other than J. S. Bach.

Giovanni Porta completes our quartet of more obscure composers, and his splendidly virtuosic trumpet sinfonia (one of three such works in the programme) provides the overture for our trip to the opera house, our last port of call for the evening.  En route to the Teatro, we hear some traditional boat songs, we experience a lavish concert given in a private palazzo, we go to one of the city’s many churches for Compline, call in at the performance of a serenata by Albinoni and go to the Ospedale della Pietà for one of Vivaldi’s violin concerti.

The usual group of strings and continuo will be joined for this programme by Mhairi Lawson (soprano), Simon Munday (trumpet) and Peter Whelan (bassoon). 

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Published on November 18th, 2011 • Back to all articles

Read the previous entry: ‘Vivaldi — The French Connection 2′ to be reviewed on Classic FM