Sulla piazza

Sulla Piazza is the debut album of Consort La Capriola, a young ensemble devoted to reviving one of the Renaissance’s least understood instrumental traditions: the 16th-century violin consort, a direct ancestor of the modern string quartet. Drawing on recent musicological research into Brescia’s pioneering violin-making and performance culture, the ensemble recreates an evening’s musical journey around Venice’s St Mark’s Square — street dances by Francesco Bendusi in the arcades, sacred works by Adrian Willaert (maestro di cappella of St Mark’s Basilica itself) inside the church, Cipriano de Rore’s celebrated madrigals in fashionable salons, and risqué villanelle in the taverns as night falls.

The album is also a showcase for an extraordinary instrument-making project: a complete seven-violin consort built specifically for La Capriola by luthier Jean-Paul Boury, modeled on the lost Amati family tradition and reconstructed from historical iconography, surviving instrument fragments, and careful acoustic experimentation (notably on bridge thickness and soundpost placement) rather than any surviving complete original. Recorded at the Église Notre-Dame de Centeilles, the project — funded in part through crowdfunding for the violins themselves — represents years of combined musicological, luthier, and performance research brought to vivid, danceable life.

Consort La Capriola
Camille Fritsch, voice
Charlotte Gerbitz, soprano & alto violin
Dorine Lepeltier-Kovács, tenor violin
Manon Papasergio, bass violin & double harp
With the participation of Odile Édouard, soprano & alto violin