Join Four Gondoliers as they travel you through Venice, in music – from Medieval times, all the way to the present day.
Featuring music, spoken word and theatre to immerse in Venetian musical culture and to explore it’s effect on modern composers like Benjamin Britten. We leave you with a question about climate change and hope for the places we love, with a new composition about home by British talent Rhiannon Randle ‘Baile’.
Date: June 6th 2025
Venue: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Gallery 7
Time: 13.00 – 14.00
Price: £5/£3
Death Of Venice
Climate change, death of a city, hope for the future
Join a musical gondola ride through Venice in Gallery 7 with the Belinfante Quartet, as we travel through time, music and art. Death Of Venice takes you from Venice’s heyday with traditional Venetian party music, to artists portraying her slowly sinking into the waves through prose and theatre. We end with hope for the future in the face of climate change with Rhiannon Randle’s new toe-tapping Baile. Experience English composer Benjamin Britten’s Third and last String Quartet in a new light. Written with Britten’s acceptance that he was dying, this intimate work travels through life, love and hope for what comes after. It portrays the wonders of Venice, while acting as a postscript to his opera Death in Venice. With sounds of the city, and Italian Art, you can visualise and hear the bells of Santa Maria in Gallery 7, the hustle and bustle of Venetian streets, the calm of the rising waters. Britten’s music acts as a mirror to the plight of places we hold dear in the wake of climate change, and leaves us with hope. Cambridge composer Rhiannon Randle takes on the message for the future with Baile – ‘Bally’. A new Irish folk music ode to home, supported by The Vaughan Williams Foundation. Venice could sink beneath the waves in our lifetime, but as we have hope for the future, there are ways we could save the places, landscapes and people we hold dear.
Music:
Music of Venice – from Medieval song, to Vivaldi, to Gondolier songs!
Benjamin Britten’s Third String Quartet – which pays homage to Venice and his Opera Death in Venice, with its last movement ‘La Serenissima’
Rhiannon Randle ‘Baile’ – which means ‘home’! Leaving us with hope for the future under climate change, for protecting the places we love. This commission threads Irish fiddle music of Rhiannon’s musical home in a a beautiful piece to lift your spirits and remind you of the beauty of nature.
Poetry about Venice – by Goethe, Lord Byron and writers from Europe where the members of the Belinfante Quartet are from!
Presented by MERITA
With thanks to the Vaughan Williams Foundation for their support with Rhiannon’s ‘Baile’ commission.