After its rediscovery in the second half of the 20th century, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has become so popular that it has become a model of inspiration for similar collections that have the same subject matter, use similar instrumental forces and, often, are commissioned to be played alongside the original. Issued in conjunction with the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Astor Piazzolla (4 July 1992), Sixteen Seasons brings together on album for the first time the four most famous Four Seasons: hence alongside Vivaldi’s Italian concertos, also the Argentinian Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas of Piazzolla (in the version by Leonid Desyatnikov, a composer of Ukrainian origin), The American Four Seasons of Philip Glass, and the “Vivaldi recompositions” of British Max Richter. To guide us through these seasons – which are spread over different continents, climates and musical styles – is Concerto Mediterraneo, an ensemble made up of musicians from all over Italy and directed by Gianna Fratta, while the eclectic Alessandro Quarta shares the solo violin role with Dino De Palma. The liner notes by historian Alessandro Vanoli and meteorologist Luca Mercalli complete a project that also stands as a reflection on the profound relationship between man and the alternation of the seasons and the role played by climate change from Vivaldi’s day to the present.

The first monographic recording entirely dedicated to Francesco Rasi is released for the 400th anniversary of his death (30 November 1621). The first interpreter of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, an astonishing tenor and poet with a life studded with triumphs, constant travels, debts and murders, this native of Arezzo was fought over by all the courts of Italy and Europe. The pieces, on texts by Petrarch, Guarini, Chiabrera and Rasi himself – including ten world premieres – are taken from the Vaghezze di Musica (1608) and the Madrigali (1610). Tenor soloist Riccardo Pisani explores their extraordinary poetic and musical power, in a kaleidoscope of affects divided into seven ‘strings of the lyre’. He is accompanied by the Ensemble Arte Musica, directed by harpsichordist Francesco Cera. The two artists have been collaborating for years on rediscovering the Italian vocal repertory of the seventeenth century, as witnessed by the recent success of their set of Frescobaldi albums, released on Arcana.

During the sixteenth century in Italy, the motto ‘i galli cantano’ (the Gauls are singing) circulated, acknowledging the supremacy of the Franco-Flemish ‘transalpine’ musicians who were summoned to the peninsula to serve princes and prelates in the techniques of composing and performing vocal polyphony. Josquin Desprez, ‘Giosquino’ to the Italians, was the emblematic figure: in addition to France, he was in the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in both Milan and Rome (1484, 1498) and of the papal (1489-95) and Este chapels (1503-4). On the fifth centenary of the composer’s death (1521), the Odhecaton ensemble proposes to retrace Josquin’s Italian itinerary with the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariæ, composed for the Duke of Ferrara Ercole I d’Este, and a selection of motets commissioned by Italian patrons. The contribution of The Gesualdo Six in the more solemn pieces brings the vocal ensemble to 22 singers, a number that is close to the forces of the Rome and Ferrara chapels and yields new sonic results in our quest to recreate how polyphony sounded in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

During his long life, the priest, nobleman, poet, and painter from Rome, Ermenegildo del Cinque (1700–73) wrote over 100 sonatas for two cellos and eighteen pieces for three cellos. Although he was a dilettante di musica, he was the most prolific composer of cello music of all time. Yet despite the fact that he also composed cantatas, a serenata and some sacred music, and was a renowned cellist in Rome, he remains virtually unknown today, even among cellists. This recording, made in the theatre of the Palazzo Altemps in Rome where del Cinque often performed, rescues some of these extraordinarily beautiful compositions from oblivion. The architect of this rediscovery is Ludovico Minasi (principal cellist of Il Pomo d’Oro, among other ensembles), who here leads a team of exceptional bass instruments featuring two recent winners of the MA Brugge competition, Andrea Buccarella and Teodoro Baù, along with the lutenist Simone Vallerotonda (a musician with long-standing ties to Arcana) and the cellist Cristina Vidoni.

Alessandro Grandi - born in Venice in 1590 - was an extremely precocious talent. Appointed deputy of Monteverdi in 1627 in Saint Mark’s Basilica, he is regarded by scholars as “the greatest motet composer of his time”. After the highly praised Grandi’s motets album “Celesti fiori” (A464), Accademia d’Arcadia now presents Lætatus sum: a selection from the three extant Psalms collections. Grandi ventured in the field of Psalms with large-scale writing only at the end of his life, his collections of Psalms were undoubtedly intended for grand occasions: the relationship between soloists, tutti, and instruments is very modern, as successive portions of the text are set in sharply contrasting textures and styles. Recorded in the sumptuous Palladian church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, this recording features magnificent and compelling masterpieces by an author considered by his contemporaries as equal to Monteverdi in the field of sacred music.

This remarkable undertaking by the Festetics Quartet represents the first and only recording of Haydn's complete String Quartets on period instruments. Recorded in Budapest between 1993 and 2006, it represents the most challenging project accomplished by Michel Bernstein, the legendary founder of Arcana who died a few months after the recording of the very last volume. Out of print for many years, Arcana's reference edition features all 58 string quartets authenticated by the composer for the great Artaria edition, with 19 volumes presented in chronological order. This monumental achievement is enriched by a detailed essay signed by the Hungarian musicologist László Somfai, one of the most eminent Haydn scholars. The Festetics have extensively studied Haydn’s original quartet manuscripts, and have relied heavily on László Somfai.

REVIEWS:

These superbly engineered recordings are probing, focused readings, if at times slightly too metronomic or lacking that last measure of elasticity. Nevertheless, on period instruments there is currently no better set of these groundbreaking works.

-- Crescendo (Pierre Jean Tribot)

Haydn: String Quartets, Opp. 33 & 42 - Volume 4 / Festetics Quartet

Tuning, balance and blend are impeccable; vibrato is not avoided but used to specific expressive or coloristic effect. Those who hanker for a combination of the clarity of the best 'period' playing, with the warmth of the Hungarian tradition will find it here.

-- BBC Music Magazine (2009)

 

With Lux laetitiae, La Reverdie continues its discographical journey after the success of its most recent production devoted to Francesco Landini: from the Florence of the great blind composer of the fourteenth century, to the splendor of the Este court in fifteenth-century Ferrara! The program presents twelve pieces from an important codex that belonged to the court, in which fashionable composers such as Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstaple tried their hand at the motet genre. The performances combine six voices with a rich array of instruments and aim to reproduce the resplendent sound of the Este cappella at the time of Lionello and Borso, passionate patrons who attracted to Ferrara many talented artists charged with adorning the court with art, beauty and harmony. An exploration of the prolific tradition of the Marian cult which, from the twelfth century onwards, was manifested in an extraordinary wealth of musical forms and which, in the fifteenth century, resulted in grandiose compositions that can still captivate us today with their complexity and fascination.

REVIEWS:

[The] music presented here is neither dry nor academic. It’s drawn from a 15th-century codex that belonged to the Este court in Ferrara, which contains motets by an odd assortment of four composers: the Franco-Flemish masters Gilles Binchois and Guillaume Dufay, and the English composers Leonel Power and John Dunstaple; all four are important figures of the early Renaissance period. You’ll hear hints of ars nova in Dufay’s setting of Flos forum, and Power’s soft but powerful Salve Regina misericordie slowly builds a mesmerizing melody line and then adds harmony as the work progresses, to quietly spectacular effect. As always, the La Reverdie ensemble imbue everything they perform with a golden light. Highly recommended to all collections.

-- The CD Hotlist

“This collection of recordings contains the fruits of my research into new sound aesthetics carried out with various travelling companions who, over the years, have collaborated with me in Ensemble Aurora, from 1995 to 2016. We have explored various facets of the repertory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, devoting ourselves chiefly – but not solely – to Italian music. We have always used exceptional original instruments or copies of excellent workmanship; we have always gone to record in historical locations with particularly interesting and diverse acoustics, all this to bring to you and share with you our love for refinement and for a sincere and natural imitation of the human voice and its warm overtones.” (Enrico Gatti)

On its debut album, La Petite Écurie presents a fascinating collection of English music by the most respected composers from around 1700: Thomas Morgan, Godfrey Finger, James Paisible and Henry Purcell. Paisible, who came originally from France, was Queen Anne’s favorite composer; he composed and directed numerous works for ‘the Queen's Oboe Band’. However, it is not only suites by Paisible himself that feature in this manuscript source; his handwriting can be recognized in both his own music and several other pieces, suggesting that he may have copied, organized performances of and perhaps arranged works by his colleagues for concerts at court. A rich variety of styles, rhythms and expressive forms may be heard here in overtures, dances, operatic arias and melodies, most of which are quite unknown. Since the oboe music of the eighteenth century is still rarely played and researched today, La Petite Écurie has set itself the task of rediscovering the beauty of a repertory that was very much in vogue at the time, performing it at the most prestigious European early music festivals and planning further recording projects.

Two years after the great acclaim aroused by Beethoven and his Contemporaries, his first recording for Arcana (‘Young Raffaele La Ragione is to the mandolin today what Gustav Leonhardt once was to the harpsichord’ - Le Monde), Raffaele La Ragione returns with an album containing the four best-known mandolin concertos, which appear in a new light here thanks to the use of three different period mandolins. For this ambitious project he is joined by the brilliant orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro, universally renowned for its lively, dynamic interpretations of instrumental and vocal music from the Baroque and Classical periods (with Joyce DiDonato, Franco Fagioli, Jakub Józef Orlinski) and directed here by its principal guest conductor Francesco Corti, a harpsichordist of international repute. From Vivaldi’s famous mandolin concertos, by way of the typically Neapolitan examples by Paisiello and Lecce, to the two more Classical concertos of Hummel (these last in their world premiere recording on historical instruments), four concertos and three precious instruments restore this repertory to its rightful place and relate almost a century of mandolin history.

Because of its favored geographical situation, the city of Lyon, with its four annual trade fairs, was the unchallenged economic capital of the kingdom of France during the Renaissance period: as Jean Delumeau has underlined: “we have provisionally numbered at 209 the societies of merchant bankers in France during sixteenth century, of which 169 were found in Lyons, and of these 143 were Italian”. These rather rough figures nevertheless show us the role played by the strong Italian community which had settled in the town, even if its representatives were not all merchants. It was in the field of music that the Italians contributed in making Lyons an artistic centre of prime importance. These Italians included the Milanese lutenist and merchant, Giovanni Paolo Paladino. Following the precedent established by his celebrated contemporary Alberto da Ripa (Albert de Rippe), an Italian lutenist in the service of King Francis I, his works were published under his French name, Jean-Paul Paladin. Paladin offers us pieces which are amongst the most difficult, the most learned but also the most beautiful of the lute repertoire of the sixteenth century. In them virtuosity and the art of composition are always placed in the service of expression.

Wind ensembles saw an interesting development throughout the eighteenth century, both in their scoring and in their function, from musique de table to Harmonie. Mozart, who appreciated all the wind instruments of his time and gave them important roles in his orchestral and chamber music, including writing solo concertos for most of them, also composed important works for wind ensembles. His early divertimenti for six wind instruments were written in Salzburg between 1775 and 1777, mostly to entertain at outdoor banquets. The two serenades for wind octet K375 and K388/384a, composed in Vienna in 1781 and 1782 respectively, coincide with the foundation of the Kaiserliche Königliche Harmonie by Joseph II of Austria, which originated a widespread trend in the Empire and elsewhere. The function of such ensembles was mainly that of playing arrangements of famous opera tunes in the palace. The most sublime example of Harmoniemusik, however, is to be found in the Serenade K361/370a, the so called ‘Gran Partita’, written between 1781 and 1784: this is the most expansive of Mozart's works for wind in duration and scoring. Award-winning ensemble ZEFIRO brings together the world’s leading specialists in performance on historical wind instruments and has gained a reputation in its thirty years of activity for lively, eloquent and expressive renderings of Mozart’s music. This six-album set assembles for the first time its complete Mozart recordings, some of which are now considered as milestones in the discography.

The partnership between the late Viennese pianist Paul Badura-Skoda and Michel Bernstein, the French record producer who founded Arcana, proved to be one of the most fruitful and long-lasting relationships in the history of recording. Among their most significant achievements is the set comprising the complete piano sonatas of Franz Schubert played on period instruments. Recorded in the 1990s, it has long been a benchmark and one of the Arcana catalogue’s top bestsellers. As part of the Beethoven celebrations, Arcana is now releasing a new edition of a related recording made in the 1980s that has been out of print for many years. To this day it is one of the few complete recordings on period instruments, and is in many respects an unrivalled achievement.

“For the complete recording of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, the performer has chosen seven instruments of the period. Period instruments are sometimes victims of haphazard conservation and hasty or unscrupulous restoration. However, the best of them possess an inimitable sound, a richness of color that is almost unconceivable and an indefinable charm. That is the reason why Paul Badura-Skoda works solely with original instruments, accepting the risk of difficulties in order to bring out the poetry and radiance of the discourse.” (Michel Bernstein)

REVIEW:

This reissue is a real gift to music lovers who have known the original records at Astrée, unavailable for a long time; for those who discover them today, wonderment is guaranteed.

Those who are fluent in English will delve into the fascinating booklet of about fifty pages signed by the late Harry Halbreich who left us in 2016. We will also admire the beautiful color photographs of the pianofortes. This reissue may well be one of the great events in commemoration of 250 years of Beethoven.

– Crescendo (France; english translation)

This Beethoven cycle is beautiful. Badura-Skoka's interpretation is transparent, consistent and robust, the piano's sound improves as later sonatas approach, and the Graf fortepiano is a superior instrument. A sublime edition. Can not be missed!

– Stretto (English translation from Dutch)

Dorothee Oberlinger writes: “All the recorder concertos on this release – chamber concertos or solo concertos – were written expressly for flauto or flautino and show the imagination, delicacy, freshness, virtuosity and sometimes even melancholy, which Vivaldi put into his writing for this instrument. We have intentionally chosen tuning at 440 Hz since, in Venice, in Vivaldi’s time, tuning was higher than in neighboring musical centers such as Rome, for example, where, at times, one even played at 392 Hz. With this high tuning, the sound of the gentle gut strings becomes clearer and more brilliant.”

After calling it ‘a wonderful album in all respects’, the magazine Diapason concluded its review of Suite Case. Violin Duos from Vivaldi to Sollima (A448) with the question, ‘When can we look forward to the second volume?’ In this new project, the violin of Stefano Barneschi gives way to the cello of Giovanni Sollima, the multi-talented musician from Palermo featured here not only as a composer. On this new journey, again beginning with Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Sollima and Chiara Zanisi travel between early and modern music, between classical and folk (the Old Scots Tunes of Francesco Barsanti), with two previously unrecorded gems by the Roman composer Giovanni Battista Costanzi. The entire recording is punctuated by tracks taken from Suite Case, a cycle composed especially by Sollima for this project.