Sunday, October 18, 2026 · 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Longy School of Music of Bard College — 27 Garden St., Cambridge, MA
An Outburst of Improvisors: 17th Century Music for Violin and Harpsichord In 1600s Italy, the performer and the composer were the same person, and nobody was playing it safe. Opera was being invented. The madrigal was being torn apart and rebuilt. Women were writing and publishing everywhere: on the opera stage, in their own salons, inside cloistered convents. Musicians improvised their way into an entirely new style of virtuoso songwriting, and four hundred years later it still sounds reckless. This intimate program for violin and harpsichord covers the whole range: instrumental covers of the pop songs of the day, some of the earliest violin sonatas ever written, ground-bass mash-ups, and plenty of improvising in the moment. Music by Barbara Strozzi, Biagio Marini, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Claudio Monteverdi, Dario Castello, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Isabella Leonarda, Marco Uccellini, Michelangelo Rossi, and Salamone Rossi, plus the premiere of a new improvisation-based work by John Morrison. Longy’s performance are free and open to the public, but please register in advance.