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The Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique française (“Centre of French Romantic Music”) is a French-administered cultural institution, research centre and concert hall, dedicated to the promotion of music of forgotten and lesser-known French composers from the time between 1780 and 1920. It is based in the Palazzetto Bru Zane, an annex to the Palazzo Zane Collalto in the San Polo area of Venice, on the Rio Marin. The activities of the foundation, which was established in October 2009, are financed by the French doctor and patron Nicole Bru’s Fondation Bru.
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The Palazzetto
In 1695, Marino Zane (1639–1709) commissioned the construction of a library (no longer extant) and a casino (Italian for ‘small house, lodge’; now the palazzetto) next to the residence of the old-established family Zane, the Palazzo Zane Collalto. The new buildings were intended to house his voluminous collection of books and paintings and to serve as a venue for art, music, and amusement. The architect Antonio Gaspari was responsible for the rich interior decoration of the casino. For a hundred years, until the end of the Republic in 1797, the complex of buildings remained under the ownership of the Zane family.
The Fondation Bru acquired the palazzetto in 2006 and restored and renovated it from the ground up, aiming to reinvigorate the building in the spirit of the late-Baroque as well as to create an appropiate location for music. The sixteen rooms now include a concert hall with a seating capacity of up to a hundred and a rehearsal studio. The lavish frescos in the salon and the grand staircase have been restored. They are now attributed to Sebastiano Ricci.
Activities of the Foundation
The foundation Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de musique romantique française pursues its vocation through a wide range of activities, directed simultaneously to the public, performers, and a musicological audience. Alongside its place of residence in Venice, the foundation is also based in Paris. Its approach is similar to that of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, founded in 1987 and focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
An emphasis lies on the organisation of concerts, opera performances, and thematically specialised festivals throughout Europe and Canada, in cooperation with various opera and concert halls, directors, ensembles, and soloists. The academic part of the activities includes the direction of musicological conferences, some of them in cooperation with the Parisian Opéra-Comique, the publication of specialist and non-specialist books, and the edition of sheet music and performance material. A considerable number of first recordings of French operas and instrumental music have been produced, partly with a detailed accompanying booklet (see Series of Publications).
Composers whose works have been brought to light owing to the commitment of the Palazzetto Bru Zane include (in chronological order) Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, George Onslow, Ferdinand Hérold, Félicien David, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Louis Théodore Gouvy, Théodore Dubois, Benjamin Godard, Florent Schmitt, and Reynaldo Hahn. Female composers, too, have been in the centre of attention, for example Louise Farrenc, Pauline Viardot-García, Marie Jaëll, Augusta Holmès, and Cécile Chaminade.
Alongside those lesser-known names, compositions of still popular composers that have been overshadowed by a small number of ‘masterpieces’ have equally been presented by the Palazzetto Bru Zane; this includes music of Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, Claude Debussy, and Paul Dukas.
Mediabase and Internet radio
Since 2015, the Bru Zane Mediabase provides lexical articles on persons, works, and various topics of the French musical life of the long nineteenth century, the latter including musical genres, cultural institutions, and instrument making. An overview lists all conferences hosted by the Palazzetto Bru Zane up to now and many of the papers are available for download as pdf-files. Unpublished documents of various archive collections (of the families Baillot and Marsick and of the Villa Medici) have been digitised and are presented in the mediabase along with contemporary documents that include iconographical and administrative sources, press accounts, librettos, and composers’ testimonies.
The Bru Zane Classical Radio has been launched in May 2016 and offers a streaming service, which broadcasts solely music of French composers of the romantic era, in the widest sense, 24 hours a day.