Alessandro Grandi (born in Venice in 1590), regarded by scholars as "the greatest motet composer of his time," was a prominent figure of the new Venetian style in the first half of the seventeenth century. An extremely precocious talent, he was considered by his contemporaries equal to Claudio Monteverdi, to whom he was appointed deputy in 1627 in Saint Mark's Basilica. Yet our knowledge of his life and musical output is scanty, and thus he has remained mostly undiscovered. "Celesti fiori" (celestial flowers), a title taken from his Fifth Book of Motets, is the first complete monograph recording dedicated to this important composer. It consists of a selection of works, almost all recorded here for the first time, chosen from his books of motets, all published between 1610 and 1630, the year in which he was killed by the plague, along with his large family. Recorded in the extraordinary acoustics of the Basilica di Santa Barbara in Mantua, where Monteverdi worked during his long stay in the city, this project features the splendid voices of the Accademia d'Arcadia, an ensemble recently founded in 2018 for the purpose of performing Italian music of the seventeenth century.

This new release is the third installment of the Stradella Project, this time exploring the composer's oratorio output. Stradella's oratorio Edith is featured here. The oratorio is named for Edith of Wilton, an English nun of noble birth born during the 10th century. Legend says that she refused to take the throne, choosing monastic life instead. Argentine soprano Veronica Cangemi performs in the title role.

The discovery of the inventory of an extraordinary collection of music from the late seventeenth century has made it possible to track down a previously unknown work by Stradella: Amare e fingere (Loving and feigning), composed in Rome, but performed in Siena in 1676. Love, jealousy, dissimulation, false identities, intrigue, festive celebrations and duels form the ingredients of this opera, whose libretto, probably attributable to Giovanni Filippo Apolloni, is inspired by a Spanish comedy of the time. The action, set in a fairytale ‘Arabian countryside’, is triggered by love affairs between characters who appear to be of different rank, and which are therefore prohibited by social conventions. In a crescendo of tension, the plot is resolved in the final scene, when the true identities of the characters, all of royal rank, are revealed, leading to the classic happy ending. Along with Doriclea, also recently rediscovered, Amare e fingere, the seventh recording of the Stradella Project, sheds new light on its composer’s Roman operatic output.

Rinaldo Alessandrini is one of today’s most eminent Monteverdi authorities, and his highly acclaimed recordings with Concerto Italiano are now widely recognised as a reference point for music lovers all over the world. Recent achievements include the completion of Monteverdi’s trilogy of operas (directed by Robert Wilson) at La Scala in Milan and at the Opéra National de Paris, and a triumphal concert tour in Australia and New Zealand with the Vespro della Beata Vergine. To mark the 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth, Arcana is proud to reissue the seminal recording of the Sixth Book of Madrigals performed by Concerto Italiano, which is also one of Arcana’s bestsellers. Rinaldo Alessandrini describes the Sixth Book as the book of separation: permanent in the case of death; temporary in the case of lovers at daybreak. It is the book of poignant expression which culminates in the cycles of lamenti, whose autobiographical character is well known: the successive deaths of Monteverdi’s wife (Claudia Cattaneo) and his favourite singer (Caterina Martinelli). Its density of expression, its ‘italianità’, not exempt from theatricality, by turns luminous and despairing, make it the place where interpretation is the fundamental element, capable of overwhelming our contemporaries.

Rinaldo Alessandrini is one of today's most eminent Monteverdi authorities, and his highly acclaimed recordings with Concerto Italiano are now widely recognized as a reference point fo rmusic lovers all over the world. Recent achievements include the completion of Monteverdi's triology of operas at La Scala in Milan and at the Opera National de Paris, and a triumphal concert tour in Australia and New Zealand with the Vespro della Beata Vergine. To mark the 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi's birth, Arcana is proud to reissue the seminal recording of the Sixth Book of Madrigals performed by Concerto Italiano, which is also one of Arcana's bestsellers. Rinaldo Alessandrini describes the Sixth Book as the book of separation: permanent in the case of death; temporary in the case of lovers at daybreak. It is the book of poignant expression which culminates in the cycles of lamenti, whose autobiographical character is well known: the successive deaths of Monteverdi's wife, Claudio Cattaneo, and his favorite singer, Caterina Martinelli. Its density of expression, its "italianita", not exempt from theatricality, by turns luminous and despairing, make it the place where interpretation is the fundamental element, capable of overwhelming our contemporaries.

Following a critically acclaimed Vivaldi album, recorder player Lorenzo Cavasanti and his partners - grouped under the name Tripla Concordia - turn their attention to Georg Philipp Telemann, with an original programme that goes beyond the usual canon of his recorder sonatas. Among Telemann's hundreds of sonatas, his last publication of solos for melody instrument and basso continuo, the XII Solos a violin ou traversiere, contains music of great expressive depth. These twelve works not only sum up the composer's approach to the solo sonata over several decades, but also reveal his continuing exploration of the genre's possibilities. Yet they have been unfairly overshadowed by several of his earlier sonata collections. This recording by Lorenzo Cavasanti and the members of Tripla Concordia offers a new perspective on the XII Solos by performing four of them with recorder in place of violin or flute. Such flexibility of instrumentation was characteristic of Telemann, who often sanctioned alternative scorings in his publications. Paired with these works is a sonata preserved in a Brussels manuscript and one from the well-known Essercizii musici. The music's significance is explored in booklet notes by Telemann scholar Steven Zohn, author of Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's instrumental works.

Harmonie & Turcherie: around the year 1800, Western music was experiencing a merging of two phenomena. On one hand was the success of a particular ensemble of wind instruments, boosted by the foundation of the royal and imperial Harmonie by Emperor Joseph himself in Vienna in 1782, the core of it's repertoire being arrangements of famous opera arias; on the other, the fashion for orientalism, reflected in different expressions of the arts: painting, sculpture, architecture and music. The typical octet of the Harmonie, consisting of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, was therefore reinforced by louder wind instruments such as trumpets, trombones, a contrabassoon or a cimbasso, as well as an array of percussion instruments - together, they could evoke the military bands of the highly feared Janissaries. That sound fascinated the most eminent composers of the time, including Haydn (Joseph and his younger brother Michael), Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti (Gaetano and his elder brother Giuseppe, active at the Ottoman court), Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Spohr, all of whom wrote small, little-known masterpieces for this particular band. Zefiro presents us with a varied program by these composers, alternating Turkish marches with chamber music works in a more operatic and deeper vein, thus revealing the versatility and colors of period wind instruments.

The Bauyn Manuscript, a key collection of seventeenth century harpsichord and other music, displays the influence of various schools of composition on the writing and performance of the great clavecinistes of the mid-seventeenth century. The recording includes works of Chambonnieres and Louis Couperin, displaying their different styles which led Le Gallois to write that ''one touched the heart and the other touched the ear'', as well as other contemporary composers such as Hardel and d'Anglebert. The Denis harpsichord of 1658 is the extraordinary protagonist of this recording, in which Giulia Nuti explores the expressive capacities of one of the earliest extant French double-manual harpsichords, displaying how instrumental refinement enables performance choies. The approach is that of Giulia Nuti's award-winning first solo recording of eighteenth-century French harpsichord music, Les Sauvages, recorded on the Taskin of 1788, which received a Diapason d'Or.

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.

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Primo Libro di Toccate (1615), Arcana is proud to make this reference recording of Girolamo Frescobaldi's most popular work available again. Here, Rinaldo Alessandrini shows to full advantage his well-known skills as keyboard virtuoso as well as his familiarity with the madrigal repertoire of the time, so important for a proper approach to this revolutionary book, whose basic elements are the affetti and where rhetoric became the interpretive key. Two period Italian instruments are used here, making it possible to rediscover the colors appropriate to Frescobaldi's music: a harpsichord attributed to

In 1738 the acclaimed violinist and composer Michele Mascitti (1664-1760) published in Paris his ninth collection of sonatas. The seventy-four-year-old Neapolitan musician was at the end of his long and celebrated career, but not of his creative powers. Dedicated to the Crozat family, which was to be Mascitti’s patron until the end of his life, the twelve sonatas for violin and bass op.9 are fine examples of the graceful blend of Italian and French styles that made this composer so popular in France. With the world premiere of eight sonatas from Mascitti’s op. 9, the Quartetto Vanvitelli carries on the rediscovery of this music that Hubert Le Blanc likened ‘to the warbling of the nightingale’. After the success of their interpretation of Mascitti’s op.8, greeted as ‘a jewel of interpretation that exalts with grace, elegance and, more importantly, finesse of touch, the individual stylistic experimentation of Mascitti’ (A111), the ensemble Vanvitelli makes with this recording another decisive step towards the full appreciation of this remarkable and unjustly forgotten composer.

“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)

Classical Music

Classical Music

It is an important moment in the life of a singer when she is able to confront the standard repertory. After years spent studying theatre and music in Shakespeare's England under the guidance of musicologist Philip Brett, Jill Feldman recorded two programmes of Henry Purcell's music in 1992, which is reissued here. Many of the ‘Ayres and Songs’ from Orpheus Britannicus are connected to the English theatrical tradition. In the earliest piece on this album, ‘From Silent Shades’, and the latest, ‘From Rosy Bow'rs’, we hear one theatrical tradition – placing the voice of truth in the mouth of a madman. In the same way, we hear the wisdom of Touchstone in As You Like It, of Feste in Twelfth Night, and of King Lear's Fool. This programme, superbly accompanied by lutenist Nigel North, searches for that wisdom throughout. In the Harmonia Sacra recording, Purcell’s sacred hymns are interspersed with his complete organ works played by Davitt Moroney, with whom Jill Feldman had collaborated ever since their meeting in 1975 as part of Philip Brett’s ensemble at Berkeley in California. The organ is an exquisite instrument built by Purcell’s contemporary, Thomas Dallam (1677), which resides in the small village of Guimiliau in Brittany.

Rome-based Andrea De Carlo and his Ensemble Mare Nostrum inaugurate here a new series of recordings devoted to Rome’s vast and multifaceted musical heritage. This world premiere recording took place in Nepi, Viterbo province, where Alessandro Stradella was born. ‘La forza delle stelle’ offers an opportunity to sample some of the fruits of the collaboration between this exceptionally expressive Baroque composer and the Roman poet Sebastiano Baldini, under the patronage of the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden. Stradella biographer Carolyn Gianturco authored the booklet notes.

This selection's booklet contains the original Latin text with translations in German, French, Italian and English.
Recording information: La congrégation "Sacra Familia" à Martinengo, Bergamo (04/08/1996-04/12/1996).

Following the success of ‘Arias for Nicolino’, a musical portrait of the celebrated castrato of Handel’s era (A427), Carlo Vistoli turns his attention to Venetian opera of the seventeenth century. The Italian countertenor – ‘a voice [...] intrinsically beautiful, strong and powerful’ (Opera Magazine) – has been delving into this repertory since the beginning of his international career with specialists such as Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, William Christie and John Eliot Gardiner. In this anthology accompanied by the ensemble Sezione Aurea, the focus is on operatic scenes and chamber music by the leading composers of the time, such as Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi, whose famous aria ‘Sì dolce e ’l tormento’ exemplifies the linking thread of the arias in this recording: disappointed lovers. They express their disillusion not only through lamenti, but also in a lighter, more humorous fashion that can include dance forms, as in the chaconne ‘Amanti, io vi so dire’ by Benedetto Ferrari, a lesser-known but historically important composer who, like Filiberto Laurenzi and Francesco Sacrati, contributed to the development of the dramma per musica as a genre.

One of the most talented singers of the new generation brings to light four gems for soprano and orchestra belonging to the great eighteenth -century tradition of Neapolitan sacred music. The three composers are representative of as many generations of an industrious dynasty: Francesco Feo (1691-1761) was the uncle of Gennaro Manna (1715-79), who in turn was the uncle of Gaetano (1751-1804). Comparison between their scores allows us to observe the extraordinary development from the austerity of the late Baroque to the elegance of the galant style. The Lamentations by the two Mannas were part of the liturgy of Holy Thursday (Officium tenebrarum), whereas Feo’s La sinderesi, a sorrowful meditation on sin and contrition, belongs to the form of the spiritual cantata and points to a private devotional environment. The short and bright Gloria by Gennaro Manna crowns the programme, symbolising the final achievement of a dimension of redemption and eternal salvation. All the pieces are characterised by the typically Neapolitan taste for purity of voice, with restrained virtuosity and radiant expressivity. This is the third instalment of the new series devoted to Neapolitan music, in collaboration with the Neapolitan Centro di Musica Antica - Fondazione Pietà de’ Turchini.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Tartini, Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell’Annunciata commemorate one of the great partnerships in the history of eighteenth-century music: the relationship between Tartini and Antonio Vandini, a cellist born in Bologna (cradle of the Italian cello school), active in Padua for fifty years, and the author of the first biography of Tartini, whom he had known since the 1720s. Coupled here for the first time are Tartini’s two cello concertos, probably intended for his friend and colleague, alongside the only surviving concerto by Vandini himself. According to reports of the period, he ‘played in such a way as to make his instrument speak,’ that instrument being the violoncello piccolo practiced by the virtuosos of Padua in the mid-eighteenth century, here played by Mario Brunello. The expressive heart of the concertos is to be found in the beautiful slow movements: in Tartini the long, eloquent melodic arches create a free inner monologue, while the rich ornamentation recalls folk motifs from the Balkan region, which he may have known. In his marvelous Andantino, Vandini gives the cello a gently symmetrical Vivaldian melody that expands in dialogue with the orchestra.

El soto dei Frari, "the lame man of the Frari": this was the nickname given to the Venetian Giovanni Picchi, perhaps a pupil of Giovanni Croce, in the charges pressed against him in 1610 for teaching music to the nuns in the Spirito Santo without a license. In 1612 we find him intent on initiating an appeal against the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, after the appointment of Giovanni Battista Grillo as organist. The appeal is successful, obliging the powerful institution to repeat the examination. We also find this original and hot-tempered personality in his 19 Canzoni da sonar con ogni sorte d'istromenti (Venice 1625): a collection which reveals the brilliant flair of this still little-known composer. The detailed instrumentation given by the author allows us to recreate the typically Venetian aural splendor, with glorious sackbut choirs and virtuosic violins, recorders, cornets and bassoon. With the Canzoni da Sonar, presented by Concerto Scirocco in the first ever complete recording of the work, Giovanni Picchi sculpts his mastery into music with a variety of vivid colors and pulsating affects, earning a place of honor in the world of the Venetian school.

The heterogeneous output of Santiago de Murcia, one of the key figures in the Baroque guitar repertory, includes a number of transcriptions from the op. 5 of Arcangelo Corelli, the famous collection of 'sonatas with violin and string bass or harpsichord' published in Rome in 1700. The diffusion of Corelli's works in Spain, and in particular in Madrid, suggests how highly the Italian style was valued at the court of Philip V, where Santiago taught Queen Maria Luisa of Savoy between 1704 and 1706. This gave rise to the idea of investigating the relationship between the Spanish and Italian styles in de Murcia's guitar music. Pieces such as the fandango, jacaras and canarios, here presented in original arrangements that attempt to achieve a synthesis between historical research and creativity, are coupled with two Corelli sonatas and a set of original or anonymous variations on the 'Follie italianas'. The result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of sonorities in which different aesthetics and instrumental techniques dialogue, contrast and blend together. After his album 'Intavolatura', devoted to the solo theorbo music of Kapsberger ('hypnotisant' - Le Devoir; 'terrific' - American Record Guide; 'outstanding' - Lute News), Stefano Maiorana turns his attention to the Baroque guitar, investigating it's unique sound and it's ability to adapt to different languages and styles.

Composed during Antonio Vivaldi's stay in Prague in 1729-30, the Concerto for Lute RV 93 is the most celebrated example of a repertoire almost totally neglected today, but once extremely popular in the German-speaking world, particularly in the Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia. After offering us a reference edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach (2022) and a representative anthology of the output of Silvius Leopold Weiss (2024), Evangelina Mascardi concludes her 18th-century trilogy by illuminating a fundamental, yet hitherto largely sidelined, chapter in the history of the lute. Alongside the Vivaldi concerto, which guitarists have embraced since the early 1960s, making it one of his most acclaimed works, we find four genuine and practically unknown gems, such as those composed by Joachim Bernard Hagen and Karl Ignaz Augustin Kohaut, now given their first recording. Accompanied by the Estrovagante Orchestra, directed by Riccardo Doni, Mascardi ventures into the rococo idiom, the stylistic context for the final virtuosic showpieces of an instrument boasting a rich history, but destined-in the space of just a few years-to be definitively eclipsed.

After the success of Mandolin on Stage, dedicated to the most emblematic 18th-century concertos for mandolin and recorded with Il Pomo d'Oro directed by Francesco Corti, Raffaele La Ragione returns with his third album for Arcana. This time he recounts a fascinating chapter in French musical history, joined by pianist Francois Dumont (who has chosen an exceptional 1896 Pleyel for the occasion) and special guest, soprano Sandrine Piau. In the 1880s and 1890s Paris discovered a deep passion for the mandolin: a fondness fuelled by the concerts held at the Trocadero during the Universal Exhibition of 1878. In the drawing rooms of high society the Neapolitan instrument became a supreme symbol of elegance and exoticism, conjuring up the atmosphere of southern Italy and immediately winning over poets and composers. The recording, created in collaboration with the Palazzetto Bru Zane, brings together original pieces, contemporary arrangements from French operas and operettas, and vocal works dedicated to the mandolin, thereby effectively recreating the soundscape and distinct allure of a fin-de-siecle salon.

For it's sixth album on the Arcana label, Voces Suaves presents a programme dedicated to one of the most influential composers of the seventeenth century, the great Giacomo Carissimi. The album features Carissimi's most famous work, the masterful oratorio Jephte, alongside two of his rarely performed virtuoso motets. It also includes the astonishingly theatrical Cristo smarrito by Domenico Mazzocchi, Carissimi's contemporary in Rome. The works on the album showcase the expressive power of Carissimi's musical language, as well as the remarkable virtuosity of the singers who originally performed his music. Instrumental interludes by Carissimi-found in the collection of his pupil Marc-Antoine Charpentier-have been interpolated into the score of Jephte, creating a unique version of the oratorio as it may have been performed in Rome during the composer's lifetime.