Heavenly Music from Historical Venice
14.4. at 6 pm Chiesa di San Salvador, Venezia
Free entry
https://www.facebook.com/events/755356532668398/
Utopia Chamber Choir (Finland)
Andrew Lawrence-King (Great Britain)
Baroque trombone trio (Finland)
Andrea Gabrieli – Adriaen Willaert – Gioseffo Zarlino – Giovanni Bassano – Cipriano de Rore – Claudio Monteverdi
The Harmony of Invention and Contest – L’Harmonia dell’ Inventione e del Cimiento
This concert re-imagines the title of Vivaldi’s (1725) Four Seasons – the artistic contest between serene harmony and bold invention – in the context of the competing styles in the ‘most serene city’ a century and a half earlier: polyphonic harmonies and block chords, canonic and polychoral invention, elegant control and daring confrontations.
In the spring of 1569, simmering tensions amongst Venetian musicians came to the boil with a scandalous public conflict in the Basilica of St Mark’s. The dispute involved the famous theorist Zarlino, champion of the richly polyphonic Franco-Flemish style of Willaert and de Rore; and his younger rival, Donato, who favoured dramatic contrasts of opposing choirs in the Italian style of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli.
Harmony was restored in 1613 with the appointment of Claudio Monteverdi, fluent in both styles of the prima prattica: complex polyphony and polychoral contrasts.