Clavis et Chorda

The musician and scholar Vania Dal Maso has compiled an innovative program about music for keyboard instruments with strings from the 14th and 15th centuries. Based on the study and interpretation of sources, both on the construction of the instruments and on musical interpretation, she explores the fundamentally different sounds and timbres of the clavichord, the fortepiano and the clavicytherium. The music encompasses a wide range of forms and genres from across Europe, including pieces from the oldest known manuscript for keyboard instruments - the Robertsbridge Codex (ca. 1320) - thus creating the most comprehensive stylistic panorama of keyboard music from that period. She plays instruments by Paolo Zerbinatti: a clavichord from 2010, made after drawings and a text by Arnaut de Zwolle (around 1440), a hammer clavicymbalum from 2011, also based on the Zwolle, and a clavicytherium from 2010, based on unknown sources from the late 15th century.