This release is dedicated to one of the most esteemed musical practices of the Renaissance: the art of accompanying the voice with the viola da gamba. Cantare alla viola (singing with a viol) is the name for this practice, which was quite common at the time. The art of this practice lies in the ability of the “viola” player to arrange and play madrigals to accompany one single voice, as a lutenist or vihuela player commonly does. Cantar alla Viola has careful selected some of the finest pieces of the Italian Renaissance in order to illustrate the intimate and skillful musical practice of Cantare alla viola. The pieces vary from the subtle and transparent trecento 2-voice ballades of Magister Piero and Andrea da Firenze played on the viella, to the exquisite and virtuous madrigals for one soprano by Luzzascho Luzasschi, accompanied by the viola da gamba. The Renaissance villanelle and 3-voice madrigals by Luca Marenzio and Costanzo Festa, are adapted for the polyphonic playing of two different bowed vihuelas. Solo pieces have been added to the release to show the instrumental practice on a bowed vihuela through arrangements of lute and keyboard pieces by composers such as Marco Antonio Cavazzoni or Francesco da Milano.

The Hamburger Ratsmusik – an ensemble looking back on a five-hundred-year history – teams up with the young countertenor Benno Schachtner on this recording of Georg Philipp Telemann’s Six Moral Cantatas. During the decades between 1720 and 1750 the middle class of the early Enlightenment sought moral education and ethical improvement deriving from human nature and reason as part of its never-ending quest for earthly happiness. It was with wit and charm that in his Moral Cantatas of 1735 Telemann set to music a poetic document conveying the spirit of this Enlightenment period. His only recently rediscovered Fantasies for Solo Viola da Gamba, published at the same time, are presented here in alternation with his Moral Cantatas, the title with which they were announced in a catalogue dating from August 1735. These two collections first performed together during a concert of the Hamburger Ratsmusik at the last Telemann Festival are now being presented here for the first time. These two works by Telemann were intended for professional and amateur musicians alike, and they seem to have met with special resonance among those interested parties who wanted to perform at home in smaller ensembles.

The instrumental ensemble Opera Quinta, directed by Fabrizio Longo, violin soloist of the team, adds an important element to the inexhaustible rediscovery of the eighteenth- century Italian heritage. The sonatas op. 1 by Angelo Michele Besseghi - composer of which, unfortunately, only few biographical information has reached us - were published in 1710, openly paying homage to the edition of his much more famous countryman who ten years earlier would have marked the course of European violin history: the Opera 5 by Arcangelo Corelli. Period ensemble Opera Quinta is violinist Fabrizio Longo, gambist Rosita Ippolito, lutenist Fabiano Merlante, and keyboardist Valeria Montanari.

Of all the composers who wrote for the gamba during his times, Johann Gottlieb Graun must have been the most diligent one, even though he was not a virtuoso on this instrument. The twenty-seven works by him that are known to us represent significant contributions to the repertoire of the concerto, cantata, and sonata. All three of the works presented here contain grand solo parts for the viola da gamba that prove to be of the highest virtuosity. Graun evidently was interested in putting a virtuoso to the test. And the Italian gambist Cristiano Contadin, the founder of the Opera Prima ensemble, lives up to his reputation (as certified by the Musica magazine and other sources) as a first-class artist whose delightful delineation of tone and flawless style reveal a complete command of his instrument. The two sacred cantatas were composed in the Italian style on the basis of texts by Pietro Metastasio, the most famous librettist and poet of his times. They are sung by the American soprano Amanda Forsythe, who has won admiration especially for her interpretations of Baroque music – and is known from our cpo albums with the Boston Early Music Festival.

Centaur is pleased to release another album by prolific composer David Loeb. The works are Setsune, Five Reveries, Kiri, Fantasia sobre “Como la rosa en el guerto,” Three Friends of Winter, Suite No. 4, Cycle for the Lunar New Year, and Canon. Composer David Loeb was born in 1939 to a family which took music and the arts very seriously. He studied first with Peter Pindar Stearns at the Mannes College of Music, and then received his master’s degree from Yale. His catalog of compositions is quite remarkably extensive and diverse. In addition to the typical assortment of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice, he has also composed extensively for Asian instruments and for early music instruments.

Hamburger Ratsmusik: an ensemble with a 500-year-old history. This contrast prompts a creative dialogue between tradition and the present day, about Early Music and vivid interpretation. The origins of Hamburg‘s “municipal music” go back to the 16th century. Under the motto “in praise of God and for the pleasure, delight and edification of Hamburg”, the city created an elite ensemble of eight city musicians, which was to be the equal of the princely court ensembles (Hofkapellen) to be found elsewhere. The Ratsmusik attained early excellence in the 17th and 18th centuries under such eminent musicians as William Brade, Johann Schop, Georg Philipp Telemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Revived in 1991 by gambist Simone Eckert, the ensemble now performs in Germany, many European countries, the USA and China. More than 30 albums (largely with world premiere recordings of Early Music) and recordings for all German public radio stations and Austrian broadcaster ORF document its rediscoveries of music from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. The ensemble received the Echo Klassik award in 2006 and 2010, and was awarded the 2016 RITTER Prize by the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation in Hamburg. The musicians will be responding to renewed invitations to China in 2021. Hamburger Ratsmusik is the Ensemble in Residence in the Komponisten-Quartier museum complex in Hamburg.

Few musicians were as versatile as the humble Brother Martini, who insisted on being called that way in spite of all the honors rendered to him in Bologna and everywhere. He is celebrated in our time as an extraordinary keeper of books, scores and paintings; in his time, he was quite famous also as an erudite musician, an expert writer of treatises, a pioneering historian, and an authentic “maestro” of music. And as a composer, obviously; but of what? Of everything that pertained to a Kapellmeister and an organist: masses, motets, psalms, hymns, organ sonatas, and so on; and also harpsichord sonatas, concertos, cantatas, duets and profane arias. The Euridice Choir conducted by Pier Paolo Scattolin and the soloists Giacomo Contro, Angela Troilo, and Vincenzo Di Donato are the protagonists of the reconstruction (seen the several gaps found on the original score) of the intermezzo ”Azione Teatrale” of 1726, and of the realization of the “Calls of the street vendors at the Bologna market,” including 13 amongst the countless vocal canons composed by Padre Martini that, once for all is offering to us a lively cross-section of eighteenth-century Bologna in its most daily and popular aspects.

The Musicalisches Lob Gottes in der Gemeine des Herrn may be regarded as the impressive high point of Telemann’s printed annual cycles. The present recording of three cantatas from this annual cycle tends more to chamber musical design. It interprets the compositions as intimate sacred music for which an ensemble with eight members completely suffices in performance respects – something corresponding to the reality in performance practice in most German church music ensembles in the eighteenth century. In view of the intimate interpretation of these cantatas, the intermezzi interspersed in them from the Twelve Fantasies for Viola da Gamba Solo have the effect of a meditative deepening of the religious subject matter. The four fantasies selected are elaborated with fine art and are just as richly arrayed musically as are the church compositions.

This release features one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century for the early music world. Telemann’s 12 Fantasias for Viola da Gamba were considered lost until the discovery of an original print in a private collection in Germany in 2015. Perhaps some of the composer’s finest work for solo instrument, they are described by soloist Richard Boothby as being “... by turns virtuosic and expressive, Telemann uses all the techniques of the instrument to create satisfyingly complete Fantasias that are full of diversity.” One of the UK’s leading exponents of early music, Richard Boothby founded the Purcell Quartet in 1984 was a founder member of Fretwork in 1985. Since then his career has been bound up with these two groups with whom he records and tours; and through whom he plays the broadest range of repertory for the instrument from the earliest music to the latest contemporary music commissioned for viols.

This programme portrays the ‘birth’ of the flute in France in the late 17th century and the following 40 years of its life as a new and fashionable instrument. A famous patron of the arts, King Louis XIV gathered elite composers and musicians to create the refinement, elegance and good taste that was demanded at his Paris Court. From the early petites pièces to more virtuoso suites and sonatas with their ornamented lyricism and grand dance rhythms, the mellow, robust and almost husky sounds of flutes from this period blend and weave around each other like the voices of two singers.