Music in Palladian Villas
Music in The Veneto
- Private concerts in six of the finest villas in the Veneto, two designed by Andrea Palladio.
- Music largely from Venice and northern Italy contemporary with the buildings, Andrea Gabrieli and Monteverdi to Vivaldi.
- World-class musicians include La Venexiana, I Fagiolini, L’Arte dell’Arco and La Risonanza, leading Renaissance and Baroque specialists.
- Access to the concerts is exclusive to those who take an all-inclusive arrangement which includes hotel, flights, meals, travel and talks.
- Talks on music, architcture and cultural history.
- Choice of three hotels and a variety of flights.
- Limited capacity: the small size of the villas and our strict criteria for selecting hotels mean that there will be no more than 140 participants.
- Options to to extend the stay with independent days or tours led by art historians.
Renaissance villas were built for recreation, for escape from the pressures of urban life. Situated in countryside ‘far from the madding crowd’, they provided the setting for artistic, intellectual and idle pursuits. From philosophical discussion and poetry readings to gustatory indulgence and assorted jolly japes.
Above all, there was music. The most immediately transporting of the arts, in its manifold variety of mood and meaning music was an indispensible accompaniment to the rural idyll of villa life.
The great age of the villa in Italy lasted from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth: happily this coincides with the great age of music in Venice and the Veneto, from Andrea Gabrieli and Monteverdi to Tartini and Vivaldi.
Matching music with place
This festival recreates something of the arcadian villa experience by placing appropriate music into a selection of the loveliest villas in the Veneto. Some of the world’s finest musicians specialising in Italian Renaissance and Baroque repertoire perform a wide range of music apposite to the individual setting, ranging from the frivolous to the austere, from intimate chamber music to celebratory fanfare.
Matching music with place, that is the key feature of the festivals Martin Randall Travel has been creating for nearly two decades.
There are also lunches and refreshments at the villas, talks on musical and cultural history and input by art historians at the villas.
The villa phenomenon
As a building type, villas are relatively unencumbered by mundane practicalities. Even though many of them were enthroned at the centre of working farms, with contiguous barns and stables, none of Palladio’s villas could properly be called farmhouses. Their patrons were the leading nobles and gentry, rich merchants, men of state, retired ambassadors. Agriculture was a subsidiary interest.
Many embody something approaching pure architectural form. The greatest of villa architects was of course Andrea Palladio (1508–1580); three of the concerts are in buildings by him. The most influential architect in the western world, he cast a particularly long shadow in his native Veneto, but his exalted example did not unduly inhibit the imaginations of his successors: there is plenty of variety in the villas of the region. Palladio’s are understated, even modest, but unfailingly monumental and supremely beautiful.
Private concerts
Admission to the concerts is exclusive to those who take the complete package of arrangements which includes hotel, meals, flights from the UK (optional) and transport by coach or minibus.
The audience is limited to 140 (though most of the concerts will have not more than 70, the small capacity of the villas requiring the concerts to be repeated).
The spoken word
There are three lectures on pertinent aspects of the cultural history of Italy by
Jonathan Keates.
Additionally, there is on-site comment about the villas by two art historians who are experts on Palladio and have led many Palladio tours in the Veneto for Martin Randall Travel:
Dr Michael Douglas-Scott is a lecturer in Art History at Birkbeck College, London University. His field is Renaissance Italy and has lectured on many tours for Martin Randall Travel.
Dr Joachim Strupp, Fellow of Buckingham University, is an art historian who has led tours for MRT since 1989. He directs a company which organises art history study days and tours.
Read about the concerts