Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, La tempesta di mare & Il piacere
Naxos
CD
$19.99Nov 21, 2006
Vivaldi's universally popular Four Seasons has become one of the most recorded pieces of classical music. The four concertos, with their virtuoso part for solo violinist, depict the changing seasons in a pastoral landscape with dazzling variety.
For the first volume of this series of seven albums, Gergely Ittzes has selected seven sonatas representative of the flute music of the 18th century. The works are played on modern flute but informed by authentic performance practice. Original obligato keyboard parts are played on piano while continuo realizations are performed on harpsichord. The players have aimed at an analytic, though spontaneous, rendition. Gergely Ittzes won several prizes and awards including the Aleksander Tansman International Competition of Musical Personalities. Alex Szilasi and Anthony Newman join Ittzes on the keyboards.
The late 17th and early 18th centuries were the Golden Age of the Recorder. Played by amateurs and professionals and admire by musical connoisseurs, the recorder was everywhere. From Italy to England, the greatest composers of the day were writing hundreds of masterworks to meet the public's demand! Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a scrappy group of colonists were carving a new nation out of the wilderness... But where were the recorders? It is one of the great ironies of the recorder's long history, that despite being ubiquitous in nearly every American public music school program, few American composers ever explored writing for it. In order to set this egregious state of affairs to right, Michala Petri, the first Lady of the Recorder, invited four American composers to make their own discovery of just what an Old World Recorder can do! For the newest installment of her ground-breaking Concerto Project, four works have been specially commissioned to showcase the sound of the modern recorder, including the late Steven Stucky's thoroughly contemporary Etudes, Roberto Sierra's Latin-tinged Prelude, Habanera and Perpetual Motion, Harpsichord virtuoso Antony Newman's Neo-Baroque Concerto for recorder, harpsichord & strings, and Sean Hickey's boldly-wrought A Pacifying Weapon.