Continuo Connect — Concert // Musica Antica Rotherhithe: La Virtù Fugante

Musica Antica chart the dramatic life of composer Antonia Bembo (c. 1640 - c. 1720) through her music.

The daughter of a doctor, from a young age she was taught music - which her father referred to as her 'virtue' - by the most famous composer of the day, Francesco Cavalli. Passed over for a role as court singer in Mantua due to an affair with the guitarist Francesco Corbetta (the most famous guitarist of the day), she instead entered into an ultimately unhappy marriage with a Venetian nobleman. Denied a divorce in 1673, in 1676 she fled - almost certainly with Corbetta - to France, where she performed for Louis XIV and was given a life pension and lodgings in a convent in the centre of Paris, where she wrote a substancial body of secular songs, religious music, and a setting of the same libretto, Ercole Amante, that her teacher Cavalli had set to music for the French court forty years beforehand. This is the third concert of Musica Antica's 2024 season.

​This concert will feature music for the baroque guitar by Corbetta, arias by Cavalli, keyboard music by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, and extracts from Bembo's Produzioni Armoniche, Ercole Amante, and her settings of the Seven Penitential Psalms.

​As ever, a bar selling wine, soft drinks and Holy Trinity's famous home-infused gins will be open from 7pm.

This concert will finish at 9:10pm.