Music for the keyboard and plucked instruments from Italy, Spain and England.

Catalina Vicens, harpsichord

Music by Marchetto Cara, Bartolomeo Tromboncino, Luis Milan, John Dowland

Tickets €18
Reduced ticket for people up to 30 years of age € 15
Reduction for 3 tickets or more € 15 each
Reduced price of €15 at the box office upon presentation of a ticket from the National Museums of Tuscany.

The relationship between plucked and keyboard instruments in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is fundamental to understanding the repertories presented in this programme. In both Italy and Spain, the lute and its Iberian counterpart, the vihuela, shared a common notational and conceptual world with early keyboard instruments such as the harpsichord and organ. The widespread practice of intabulation—adapting vocal polyphony or instrumental works into idiomatic tablature—allowed repertories to circulate fluidly across instrumental boundaries. This is already evident in some of the earliest printed sources: the Venetian print Intabulatura de Lauto (1508) by Joan Ambrosio Dalza, and shortly thereafter the frottola intabulations printed by Andrea Antico (1517), which translate vocal genres into instrumental textures. Likewise, early keyboard publications such as the Recerchari (1523) of Marco Antonio Cavazzoni reveal a parallel idiom, in which improvisatory ricercars explore the harmonic possibilities of the keyboard, while quoting vocal polyphony.

In Spain, this shared idiom reaches a particularly refined synthesis. The vihuela books of Luys de Milán (El Maestro, 1536) and Luys de Narváez (1538) stand alongside the keyboard works of Antonio de Cabezón, whose Obras de música published by his son in 1578, preserves a repertory deeply informed by the same principles of variation, cantus firmus treatment, and idiomatic figuration. Across these sources, distinctions between instrumental media become secondary to a shared compositional language grounded in polyphony, ornamentation, and the transformation of pre-existing material.

Aesthetic continuity between these repertories is further underscored by the pervasive presence of melancholy, a defining expressive mode of the period. Rooted in Renaissance humoral theory and courtly culture, melancholy finds in England more explicit articulation in the celebrated Lachrimae tradition, where sorrow becomes both a personal and a shared cultural signifier. In this context, two of the most revered composers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England chose the virginals and the lute as a source for their creations: William Byrd and John Dowland. Byrd refines and elevates melodies drawn from shared musical culture into intricate keyboard works, while Dowland emerges as a composer whose own tunes attain the status of common musical currency, inviting transcription, adaptation, and reinterpretation at the keyboard. Together, their music reveals a repertoire shaped equally by personal dedication, social exchange, and the creative reimagining of familiar sound.