Celebrating the golden age of English keyboard music from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this personal anthology features works by the greatest composers of the time. John Dowland’s beguiling Pavanes and Galliards, transcribed by Martin Peerson and William Byrd, are punctuated by John Tomkins’ dazzling song-variations, Thomas Morley and William Tisdall’s whirling dances, and ravishing madrigals set by Peter Philips and others. John Amner’s masterful O Lord, in Thee is all my trust contrasts with William Byrd’s evocative, chiming variations The Bells, showcasing the different styles of these composers. This recording extends Giulia Nuti’s oeuvre of critically acclaimed recordings on historical harpsichords; her solo recital Le Cœur et l’oreille: Manuscript Bauyn (Arcana, 2017), recorded on the harpsichord built by Louis Denis in 1658, was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. In this recording Giulia plays an exquisite Italian virginal from c. 1575.

The Neapolitan school of instrumental music and its links with the rest of Europe in the eighteenth century – this is at the heart of Quartetto Vanvitelli’s activities. After concentrating on the work of the composer Michele Mascitti of Abruzzo, an outstanding figure representing Italian music in France, the quartet now turns to a composer-violinist from Sardinia, Giuseppe (Joseph) Agus (1722-1798), who achieved success in London and Paris in the second half of the 18th century. Like Mascitti, he studied in Naples, then lived in London from the late 1740s, coming into direct contact with the most important protagonists of 18th-century English music: George Frederic Handel, Thomas Arne, Johann Christian Bach. Working as a violinist in the theatres and concert halls of the English capital, Agus published various instrumental collections and participated in collective works with music by Handel, Arne and Hasse. Even though his artistry was appreciated in London, Agus moved to Paris in the 1770s, where he published a few compositions and taught at the Conservatoire until his death in 1798.

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.

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.

The seven compositions commonly called works for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach, despite more than a century of studies, do not seem to want to completely reveal the mystery of their birth, of their real instrumental destination and of Bach's decidedly abstract concept of the instrument, the lute, which in its latest evolution continued after almost three centuries of glory to attract the attention of the highest musical lineage. The mystery did not distance the interpreters from these compositions, which Bach did not collect in a single cycle, as he did for the works for solo violin and cello, and indeed it has made them perhaps more stimulating, especially if we consider that in the turn of seventy years the lute was destined to disappear from the music scene. There are moments in which, to discover or define who we are, we must confront ourselves with the unknown. Evangelina Mascardi did it with this extraordinary engraving, which in addition to being the first Bach complete lute works recorded by a women, writes a new important interpretative page, the result of artistic maturity, critical rethinking and original instrumental research.

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.

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

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.

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.

Acclaimed for its ‘rhythmic verve, spontaneity and riot of splendid colors’ (Pizzicato magazine on Giovanni Picchi’s Canzoni da Sonar con ogni sorte d’istromenti), Concerto Scirocco now immerses itself in the English musical scene of the Elizabethan era, and more especially the genres of the masque and the fantasia.

Great cultural ferment swept through England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The courts invested huge sums of money in the production of ‘masques’, entertainments combining music, dance, theatre and stage design in a sumptuous display of grandeur. At the same time, the first public playhouses were founded in the suburban districts of London: The Theatre, the Red Lion, the Rose, the Swan, and in 1599 Shakespeare’s Globe. Music played a key role in accompanying this eccentric burst of cultural vitality: the asymmetrical fantasias of John Hilton, the monumental canzonas and pavanes of William Brade, the impudent, rhetorical masques of Robert Johnson and others, reveal an era of unparalleled musical invention and exploration.

A young ensemble of instrumentalists and singers revives the precious historical practice of singers accompanying themselves, thus producing a wholly new sound in music usually assigned to unaccompanied voices. With Concerto di Margherita, self-accompanied singing becomes ‘collective’ for the first time in our era, and is amplified in a shared gesture in which all the members of the group – playing and singing together with extraordinary coordination – produce a sonority unprecedented in this repertory.

Created at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, the group (which is named after the Duchess of Ferrara, Margherita Gonzaga) performs as a consort of five voices, theorbo, harp, viola da gamba, guitar and lutes, inspired by the Concerto delle dame of Ferrara. The recording debut of Concerto di Margherita presents arrangements of a wide range of instrumental and vocal works (madrigals, villanellas and canzonas), drawing on music by De Wert, Gastoldi, Monteverdi and the ‘blind man’s buff’ scene from Giovan Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1580).

After the album Bach, Little Books, harpsichordist Francesco Corti continues his collaboration with Arcana with a 2-album recording entirely dedicated to George Frideric Handel. At the center of the project are the eight “Great” suites. These masterpieces were the composer’s first published set, and are a clear testimony to his virtuosity at the keyboard. Their characteristically diversified styles reflect not only the mélange of national traditions assimilated by the young composer, but also his phenomenal improvisatory talent. Moreover, the attraction of these pieces lies in their melodic and rhythmic affinity to the world of singing and orchestral writing, Händel’s strongest interests. Arrangements of Handel’s operatic overtures and arias started circulating early in his career in England, and in his later years he was known to perform his overtures on the keyboard himself. Corti designs a program showcasing the composer’s brilliant treatment of the instrument, choosing to complement the “Great” Suites with a selection of transcriptions from Händel’s own hand and from his close musical circle.

REVIEWS:

It’s possible that Francesco Corti’s distinction as a conductor and a collaborative keyboard artist overshadows his considerable gifts as a harpsichord soloist. For example, whoever hears about his 2010 Bach Partitas released by Berlin Classics, a terrific “sleeper” edition if there ever was one? All this is to say that collectors looking for a reference-worthy harpsichord version of Handel’s eight “great” Suites should consider Corti. Although some listeners may take issue with the slightly distant and diffuse engineering, I find the sound quality attractively rounded, resonant, and warm, as if you’re hearing Corti’s 1738 Christian Vater model instrument in an intimate concert venue.

Certainly the sonics enhance Corti’s wonderfully freewheeling way with Suite No. 1’s improvisatory Prelude and excitingly boisterous Gigue. Suite No. 2’s opening Adagio and Suite No. 3’s concluding Air amount to a masterclass in how to organically integrate ornaments. Suite No. 4’s fugal opening Allegro attains bracing clarity due to Corti’s subtle agogic phrasings, while the ubiquitous Suite No. 5 “Harmonious Blacksmith” variations are more about cumulative build than facile virtuosity.

Despite Corti’s headlong pace for Suite No. 6’s Gigue finale, the rapid phrases have plenty of breathing room. And Suite No. 7 ‘s familiar Passacaille manages to convey both pomp and vulnerability at the same time.

Equally inspired performances of overture transcriptions flesh out this release. I especially love the imaginative registration shifts in Teseo’s Allegro section, plus Corti’s varied approaches to arpeggiating chords in Il pastor fido’s adagio opening section. For all of the thought and scholarship informing Corti’s interpretations, they consistently convey vitality, spontaneity, and forward sweep, without the least hint of self-awareness or pedanticism. Without a doubt, the title “Winged Hands” befits this fabulous release.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

On his second solo album for Arcana, after L’Ultimo romano, Simone Vallerotonda explores the metaphysical and sensual world of seventeenth-century French lute music. The result is Méditation: four suites in four different keys, each associated with a season and with one of the four ‘humors’ (melancholic/autumn, sanguine/spring, phlegmatic/winter, choleric/summer) that were said to characterize human beings in their temperament and physical traits. An anatomy of the human soul, passing from the rarefied and reflective atmosphere of Charles Mouton’s prélude non mesuré through Jacques Gallot’s dizzying rondeaux, Valentin Strobel’s skipping, exotic canaries, the eulogies of Robert de Visée’s tombeaux, where the notes resonate like prayers and tears for the deceased, to the bizarre, asymmetrical courantes of Dubut le Père. A journey at the conclusion of which we find human beings described in their different and contrasting passions by means of music – music whose colors, though centuries old, portray them with extraordinary modernity.

For twenty years Marco Serino was Ennio Morricone’s go-to violinist, the soloist on his film soundtracks and on world tours where they were reworked for the concert hall. In January 2020, after what proved to be his last public concert, at the Italian Senate in Rome, Morricone finished the transcription of this magnificent and unpublished collection, which recasts the themes of his most famous scores in suites transcribed for violin and orchestra. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Marco Serino and dedicated to him as a fruit of the artistic partnership between the two men. The collection alternates between pieces already performed in concert and others that are heard in this version for the first time. A year and a half after the composer’s death, this extraordinary document, a testimony to friendship and professional esteem, now becomes a recording project with the collaboration of Andrea Morricone, the composer’s son, who conducts the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento.

A vocation for experimentation was unquestionably an essential component of Bach's mindset. It was a desire to surpass, in every possible respect, whatever had been achieved up until then in a given genre or musical form, while extending to the utmost the resources and technical capabilities of individual instruments and the human voice (and thus also of individual performers). All of this was to be accomplished in the search for a perfection that is both aesthetic and spiritual. This ceaseless aspiration-cultivated from the beginning to the very end of his life-to go beyond the limits shapes the works selected for the second solo album by harpsichordist Cristiano Gaudio, whose debut recording was awarded a Diapason d'Or and Classica's Choc de l'Ann�e. From the dazzling virtuosity of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue to the contrapuntal complexity of the Ricercare a 6 from The Musical Offering; from the art of transcription, magnified in the arrangement of the Violin Sonata no. 2, to the "twelve-tone" last fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, whose subject exceptionally includes all the notes of the chromatic scale-all these works embody that bold erosion of limits that Bach's music pursued as it's true mission. They give both performers and listeners, for over three centuries, the thrill of an intellectual adventure-indeed even a physical experience-that is constantly on the edge.