The UNC Charlotte Sackbut Quartet and the Central Piedmont Community College Early Music Consort will perform a joint concert at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 1, in the atrium of UNC Charlotte Center City.
This free concert, “Renaissance Venice in Scenes and Sounds,” will celebrate the music and art of the 16th-century Venetian School and the 400th anniversary of the death of Giovanni Gabrieli (1554-1612), a composer known for his polychoral works.
Renaissance Venice was a vital hub of trade and a cultural center that was home to painters such as Giorgione, Bellini, Tintoretto and Titian. Music at the cathedral of St. Mark accompanied the pageantry of both the church and the state. Composers such as Gabrieli and Adrian Willaert were influential not only for their polychoral works for the split balconies of St. Mark’s but also for their secular madrigals with expressive harmonies and word painting. This style spread throughout Europe and helped to push music into the Baroque.
Musicians will use the balconies of the Center City atrium to perform polychoral music, as well as other pieces, on instruments from the period: violas da gamba, recorders, harps, cornettos, and sackbuts, an ancestor of the modern trombone.
Scenes of Venice and paintings by Venetian masters will be projected on the atrium wall.