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Fantasia Orchestra Returns to Sotheby’s for an Evening of Old Masters
26
August
2025
This summer, a string quartet from Fantasia returned to Sotheby’s for a special evening celebrating Old Master paintings through music. Set within the galleries, the performance explored pairings of art and sound from the same year and country, offering audiences a rare glimpse into the cultural worlds in which these works were created.
The programme centred around three remarkable paintings, each paired with music that shared its historical moment.
Clara Peeters’ A Presumed Self-Portrait (1610) was matched with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s Chromatic Fantasy (1610). Peeters’ painting, striking in its quiet confidence and detail, sits alongside Sweelinck’s adventurous harmonic language, both works reflecting a moment of innovation and self-awareness in early seventeenth-century Northern Europe.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s powerful David with the Head of Goliath (c.1640) was paired with Claudio Monteverdi’s Pur ti miro from L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643). Gentileschi’s dramatic, emotionally charged canvas found a natural counterpart in Monteverdi’s music, which was redefining the expressive possibilities of vocal writing at the dawn of opera.
The final pairing brought us to the end of the eighteenth century with JMW Turner’s The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol (1792), set alongside the finale of Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Op.74 No.3 (1793). Turner’s painting, created when he was just 17, is the earliest-known exhibited work by the artist and was lost for over 150 years before being rediscovered last year. Hearing Haydn’s exuberant quartet beside this youthful, storm-filled canvas felt especially fitting.
Sotheby’s is only a short distance from the Hanover Rooms, where Haydn performed frequently during his London visits in the 1790s, lending the pairing a powerful sense of place as well as time.
An added personal resonance came for Fantasia’s Principal Cellist Toby White, whose cello was made in London in 1790, just a few years before Haydn composed the quartet heard that evening.
