ICI London supports Italian Sounds in London 2025 | Locanda Salieri
Part of the BAROQUESTOCK FESTIVAL
31st October to 5th December, Heath Street Baptist Church, NW3 1DN
Baroquestock Festival is presenting ‘Italian Sounds in London‘ for the fifth consecutive year. This year’s series is dedicated to the composer Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), marking the 200th anniversary of his death. The series opens with a chamber concert on 31st October, telling the story of Salieri both as a pupil and master, through the music of Florian Gassmann, Mozart, Franz Schubert, Weigel and Lebrun. On 29th and 30th November there will be two performances of his comic opera ‘Falstaff’, and on 5th December the Festival will conclude with another chamber concert — imagining ourselves in Locanda Salieri gathered around a table (in this case, a fortepiano!). There we will meet Mozart, the “false enemy”, as well as many other musicians who owe their future success to Antonio Salieri. All concerts will take place at Heath Street Baptist Church in Hampstead. Tickets and the full concert programme can be found at baroquestock.com
1st Concert in the Festival:
Friday 31st October 7.30pm
SCHOOL OF FUGUES performed by Istante Collective
Music by Schubert, Gassmann, Salieri, Mozart & Lebrun
Heath Street Baptist Church NW3 1 DN
Salieri was born in 1750, towards the end of the Baroque era, when new musical styles were beginning to develop — the Galant Style, the Empfindsamer Stil, and Sturm und Drang, and meanwhile, in Vienna, Gluck was beginning his “reform” of Opera Seria. When Salieri died in 1825, Beethoven had already written his Fifth Symphony and Schubert had composed his most famous Lieder. In this sense, Salieri represents an extraordinary example of the fusion of ideas, styles, and traditions. Perhaps he did not succeed in developing a more personal musical language beyond Viennese classicism, yet he certainly influenced a new generation of composers who would open the doors to Romanticism. To this day, fugue and counterpoint have remained the foundation of composition teaching, and it is this timeless form that has inspired the programme of the first concert in the series: School of Fugues.
Florian Leopold Gassmann was already court composer in Vienna when he “adopted” the young Salieri, whom he met during a stay in Venice, bringing him to the Habsburg capital and taking care of his musical education. His String Quartet in E minor features a fugue as its central movement, something that Salieri surely remembered when writing his own small fugue for string quartet. Once an adult and established composer, Salieri would count among the young Beethoven amongst his pupils, as well as Schubert, from whom you will hear the beautiful String Trio in B-flat, D.471. Mozart never ceased to bend “strict” counterpoint to the expressive needs of his musical imagination: his String Quintet in C minor is an example, with its Menuetto in canon and Trio in inverted canon. You will also hear a short trio from Salieri’s “student” Weigl (which also contains a fugue!), while the virtuosic Oboe Concerto by Ludwig August Lebrun recalls one of the most important events in Salieri’s life: the commission of the opera Europa Riconosciuta for the inauguration of the new Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1778.
Full concert programme and tickets: https://baroquestock.com/whats-on/