Novus Ritus, a CD featuring percussion, voice, live electronics, and interactive video, has been released by Stradivarius. This project is part of MUSIC4D, an initiative of the "A. Scontrino" Conservatory of Trapani, funded by the European Union under the Next Generation EU program, with scientific coordination by Eugenio Catone. MUSIC4D is an innovative project created to explore the intersections between music and technology, redefining the boundaries of education, composition, and performance in the digital age. Conceived by Antonino Errera, Novus Ritus was brought to life through a collaboration between the "A. Scontrino" Conservatory of Trapani and Arizona State University, facilitated by Simone Mancuso and Gabriel Jose Bolanos, professors of Percussion and Composition, respectively, at the university. The tracklist unfolds through four tableaux vivants, animated by the pulse of percussion rooted in archetypal rhythms. The original music is performed by the composers themselves, with the vocal contribution of Irene Sciacca, a student at the Scontrino Conservatory and co-author, alongside Errera, of the vocal lines for the chants, which are performed in four languages: Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Sicilian. The instrumentation includes both ritual Mediterranean instrumentso typical of Morocco and Tunisia and instruments used in classical and avant-garde music, including the sixxen, microtonal instruments designed by the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. In the album liner notes, Miriam Scotto di Santolo writes: "Filtering, reverberation, granulation, and sound spatialization 'transport' the audio from the present to the remote past, closing the magic circle like contemporary mechanai. Novus Ritus, as the Latin etymology suggests, points to the cyclical nature of an Hypostasis: Rites dedicated to the Moon, the prehistoric Great Mother who appears in the sky each month as a reflection of the Sun as a sickle announcing birth and death, wind and rain, sowing and harvest, in a mystical dance that has always inspired poets, mystics, and artists everywhere." It is an original project with broad geographical and temporal horizons, an evocative listening journey that suggests narratives, stories, and references to be identified and discovered within an intertwining web of auditory and visual impressions.

Stradivarius is pleased to announce the release of a CD by Andrea Rebaudengo, a pianist with an intense concert career and a particular predilection for music written over the last hundred years, featuring a performance of Finale by Paolo Castaldi (1930-2021), an Italian composer and essayist with a highly personal artistic path, ranked among the greatest contemporary Italian composers. Produced in collaboration with the Sentieri selvaggi cultural association, the album offers a live recording of the performance of Finale on December 1, 2008, in the presence of the composer, 35 years after the publication of the score, composed between 1971 and 1973. A monumental score lasting approximately 45 minutes and in four movements, the work marked a break with the spirit of the years in which it was published, revealing a new poetics on which the composer would later build much of his creative journey. The album thus offers a re-listen to an important body of twentieth-century piano composition, to rediscover a composer of fundamental importance for the musical languages of the second half of the twentieth century, then an isolated voice and today finally recognized.

Stradivarius is pleased to announce the release of the new album by Mirco de Stefani (b. 1959), a composer whose catalog features more than eighty works for solo instrument, full orchestra, chamber orchestra, vocal and instrumental chamber ensembles, and choir, as well as the opera Le Baccanti and several essays on musical aesthetics. The fruit of continuous experimentation, research, and design, the new album Canzoni del giardino incantato. Passeggiata musicale nell'Orto Botanico di Padova (Songs of the Enchanted Garden. A Musical Stroll through the Botanical Garden of Padua), featuring soprano Barbara Zanichelli and pianist Aldo Orvieto, stems from a personal itinerary where past and present, the physical and the metaphysical engage in dialogue, and where music and poetry confront history and microhistory. The foundation of the project is a fascination with the Botanical Garden of Padua-a jewel of shapes and colors, a Theater of wisdom and harmony masterfully preserved over time, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The CD brings together 6 Canzoni (Songs), each representing a step on a journey where music intertwines with the historical, human, and artistic adventure of an author (with texts by Ludovico Ariosto, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, and Federico Garcia Lorca). This allows listeners to relive four centuries of the Botanical Garden's history through music and song. Walking, listening, and observing become the three elements that accompany the birth and development of the Canzoni del giardino incantato. This album was born from the weaving together of different fields of knowledge, seeking a dialogue between music, poetry, and the historical, physical, and human landscape, centering on a specific geographical location and the surprising, fascinating uniqueness of it's history.

Inicia ! is a collective of three composers (Alireza Farhang, Antonin Serviere, and Patrick Marcland) founded in 2020, with the aim of promoting contemporary musical creation in the Nice region. Engaging renowned musicians, the ensemble presents concerts in which particular attention is paid to scenography, staging, and choreography, with a focus on transdisciplinarity and dialogue between art forms. In 2021, they produced and performed the music for Laurence Marthouret's triptych of choreographic works, 'Rituals'. The Inicia! Ensemble has collaborated with the CIRM (National Center for Musical Creation in Nice, now extincted) and L'Entrepont at the 109 Contemporary Culture Center, located in Nice.

Hans Werner Henze. Royal Winter Music. Two Sonatas on Shakespearean Characters marks an important stage in Stefano Grondona's recording career: after years of sustained engagement with it and public performances (roughly from 1982 to 1995), the musician returns to confront this pivotal work of twentieth-century guitar repertoire. At the same time, in the manner and outcomes of this traversal, the record bears witness to an oblique and little-trodden modality of approaching compositions that, like this one, embody peculiarities and contradictions of the more cultured guitar repertoire. The physiognomy of this work, as Marek Orszulik argued (Aspects of the Historical Development of Repertoire for the Guitar. A Case Study of Hans Werner Henze's Royal Winter Music, Sonatas on Shakespearean Characters, University of Alberta, 2016), reconciles the sonata, understood as a genre of large-scale form and monumental architecture, with the Character Piece, a rhapsodic, dramatic, and psychological composition. In the introductions to the printed editions published by Schott, Henze makes clear that, through the Royal Winter Music cycle, he intended to engage with a series of key characters from Shakespearean theatre (to whom the different movements of the sonatas are dedicated), who appear and disappear through the guitar's sonic textures.

A listening experience entirely dedicated to the sounds of the viola, from classical to contemporary. This is the new album by Luca Sanzo, a musician with an intense concert, recording, and teaching career, and professor of viola at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. A frequent guest at important venues and prestigious chamber music, contemporary, and electronic music festivals, Luca Sanzo has dedicated many compositions to him. The album opens with Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013, performed in a G minor transcription; it is followed by another Bach work, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 for harpsichord, in the 1950 transcription for solo viola by Zoltan Kodaly, a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, and teacher. The first edition was edited by violist William Primrose, who also distributed it. This fascinating and intense sonic journey through different compositional worlds continues in chronological order with Gyorgy Ligeti's Sonata for Viola Solo, composed between 1991 and 1994, in six movements, alternating between slow and fast movements. The program concludes with Lucia Ronchetti's Requiem for Viola Solo (1982), now dedicated to Michele Sanzo, brother of Luca Sanzo. As Lucia Ronchetti explains: 'In the Requiem I tried to create a sonic labyrinth from which there seems to be no escape, making the performance a severe physical and mental test. In this sense, Beethoven's Great Fugue, Op. 133, seemed to me the most extreme and rigorous representation of a sonic prison and a search for liberation and elevation.'

TYRANNIDE was conceived from the desire to explore the theme of cante jondo as a universal expressive archetype, not confined to the Spanish tradition but deeply rooted in human nature. It's primordial character - often expressed through the insistence of the semitone and microtonal inflections - becomes a symbol of the human condition, forced to confront suffering, death, and their inexorable musical reflection. A tyranny, indeed: that of a lament that does not belong to a single people or era, but which runs through the history of music, re-emerging in the form of appoggiaturas, suspended tensions, and melodic lines filled with longing. Cante jondo, originally connected with Andalusian flamenco, thus becomes, in the programme of this recording, a universal musical principle, capable of manifesting itself even in languages far removed from the Spanish tradition. The programme includes two works never previously recorded: Cantar de mio Cid by the French composer Jean-Dominique Krynen and the Concerto Trois Graphiques by Maurice Ohana in it's original arrangement for guitar and piano. Around these two central works unfolds a musical journey that places cante jondo in dialogue with different historical and stylistic contexts, revealing it's surprising expressive continuity.

While listening to the profoundly perceptive performance by the pianist Jurgis Karnavicius of the entire cycle of 20 etudes, we move together through a shimmering, gentle landscape of changing light: there is a special peace in his playing that does not mean stagnation; rather, it is a slow, deep process, similar to the movement of light through the space of a room when morning is just breaking. This music creates the impression that the pianist becomes a mediator between two silences - the silence that was before the first note, and the silence that will remain after it fades. Thus, the etudes here take on not only the form of sound, but also a slow, plastic movement that continues long after the hands lift from the keys. Some etudes fly with an inexorable driving force, their rhythms echoing human steps, heartbeats, a kind of internal engine. Others unfold like meditations, stretching time until it almost evaporates. A portrait of Philip Glass emerges, not just as a minimalist icon or a composer of large-scale works, but as an artist who understands the true value of simplicity, and invites us to listen with openness and wonder. And perhaps the etudes on this lovingly realised recording will become, for someone, that unforgettable, life-transforming encounter with Philip Glass's music. -Laura Karnaviciute

Soprano Laura Catrani's highly personal journey into the world of solo voice writing continues with a new, singular project. After the widespread acclaim for Vox in Bestia, a Dante-inspired project born in 2021, Vox in femina is now released again by Stradivarius. The album, with the exception of the famous Sequenza III for female voice by Luciano Berio and Stripsody by Cathy Berberian, which respectively open and close the listening experience, brings together a range of pieces by contemporary Italian composers written especially for her. In particular, the album features original works by Leonardo Marino, Alessandro Solbiati, Matteo Franceschini, Federico Gardella, Paolo Marchettini, Fabrizio de Rossi Re, and Daniela Fantechi. A listening journey that suggests new points of interest and becomes a surprising exploration of contemporary production dedicated to vocality, accompanied by the personal interpretation of Laura Catrani, an artist who has undertaken important research and is considered by critics to be a reference voice for chamber music, twentieth-century, and contemporary repertoire.

GEMINIANI Violin sonatas, op. 4/1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12 • Liana Mosca (vn); Antonio Mosca (vc); Luca Pianca (archlute); Giorgio Paronuzzi (hpd) (period instruments) • STRADIVARIUS 33853 (67:41)


William S. Newman, in his massive study of the Baroque sonata, listed Francesco Geminiani’s sonatas for violin and continuo (op. 1 from 1716 and op. 4 from two decades later) and for violin and cello (op. 5) and judged Geminiani’s knowledge of the violin to equal that of Giuseppe Tartini or Pietro Locatelli (the latter of whom, like Geminiani, had been a pupil of Arcangelo Corelli, though a more technically adventurous one), but considered his style to be more conservative. Of the six sonatas presented by Liana Mosca, Antonio Mosca (her father), Luca Pianca, and Georgio Paronuzzi, all but two consist of four movements (the others numbering three); none of the movements’ titles give a hint of their dance-like elements or rondo forms. Almost all the sonatas have been cast in major keys. Geminiani would later rework six of the 12 sonatas of op. 4 (including No. 1 and No. 7 from Stradivarius’s collection) as concerti grossi. While Mosca remarks in a personal note in the booklet that Geminani’s sonatas from op. 4 haven’t received a great deal of attention, Rüdiger Lotter included the First, Eighth, Ninth, and 10th (two from Mosca’s selection) in a program released on Oehms 356 that also included several sonatas from Antonio Maria Veracini’s op. 1 ( Fanfare 29:1).


Geminiani revised the sonatas of his op. 1 at about the same time as he published op. 4 and included in the new edition of op. 1 the kinds of ornaments that make so striking an impression in Mosca’s performance of op. 4, as in the First Sonata’s Adagio (and also that of the Third Sonata). In that movement, she also displays a rhythmic and dynamic flexibility to create a capricious expressive sensibility that apparently suits not only the works themselves but Geminiani’s reputation as an expressive performer (among some: Tartini called him il furibondo , while John Hawkins thought he lacked the fire of the later violinists of his era). The sonata’s second movement isn’t fugal; it depends for its effect on the piquancy of its homophonic lines, of which Mosca gives a tangy account. The continuo provides an ingratiating strumming accompaniment in the Largo, a backdrop against which Mosca makes at times startling adjustments to the solo’s dynamic level; the finale includes surprises after dramatic pauses, and Mosca times them with the acute sensibility of a persuasive rhetorician. In general, she produces a twangy though by no means sharp-edged tone from her violin (and a perhaps surprisingly full one from its lower registers), described as a Venetian instrument from about 1750.


Mosca and the ensemble bring vivacious wit to the second movement of the Seventh Sonata and its jaunty subject (do these suggest the stolidity for which Geminiani has sometimes been condemned?) and spice to the ornamentation of the sonata’s third movement, Moderato. The Adagio of the Third Sonata showcases, as well as the encrustations of ornamentation mentioned earlier, the sudden gestures that make the sonatas sound inventive, at least from an expressive point of view (that sense of invention, continues, reaching almost to the level of improvisation, in the ensuing Allegro). The Sixth Sonata, again in D Major, at first seems almost somber compared to the three that precede it on the program, until Mosca dispels whatever gloom might have enshrouded it with her bright gaiety in the second movement; similarly, she shifts from the almost romantic sensibility of the sonata’s Andante to crisp Gallic sprightliness (Geminiani spent time in Paris) in the final movement, recalling a similar vein in the works of Jean-Marie Leclair (also a musical descendent of Corelli, this time through Giovanni Battista Somis). The two three-movement sonatas omit the slow movement; what they lose in affetuoso they gain in starchiness (although the last Allegro of the 10th Sonata includes a slow episode that almost replaces the missing movement). A multisectional fantasy serves as the first movement of the 12th Sonata’s three.


Lotter deploys a more astringent tone in his recording but he hardly stints on ornamental or expressive detail. Still, Mosca’s unaffected geniality, dramatic Luftpausen , and rhetorical sensibility breathe extra life into her performances.


With its clean recorded sound, its imaginative performances, and its ingratiating literature, Mosca’s selection of Geminiani’s sonatas might serve either as a favorable introduction to the works of the composer for those who aren’t familiar with him or an enjoyable reminder for those who know him that he brought more than Corelli’s teachings to London. Strongly recommended to all types of listeners.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

The Scelsi Collection. With the 'Scelsi Collction', Stradivarius presents the extraordinatry artist, Giacinto Scelsi: musician, poet, writer, and intellectual of our time. In close collaboration with the Isabella ScelsiFoundation, sole heir to the composer, Stradivarius continues its production of a series of recordings made with excellent performer, among them those who are already experts of Scelsian practice as well as those who are exploring the 'universe of Scelsi's for the first time. Conceived as an exclusive collection of monographic albums, hitherto never undertaken in Italy, these new recordings of his vast compositional output will constitute a reference point for the awareness, study, and performance of the oeuvre of Giacinto Scelsi.