La Decima Musa, or The Tenth Muse: Music from the Golden Age of Venetian Opera, 1650-1660

Musica Antica Rotherhithe present music by Francesco Cavalli, Barbara Strozzi, Francesco Lucio, P.A. Ziani and Giovanni Legrenzi - much of it unheard since the 1650's - using the surviving payment records of a seventeenth-century venetian impresario to reconstruct the band you would have seen in a venetian theatre pit 370 years ago.

For this performance, we will be using two original keyboard instruments from the University of Edinburgh's keyboard collection: a harpsichord by Bernardo Trasuntino (built in 1574) and virginal attributed to Francesco Poggio (c. 1620).