Born in Bologna, Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632–1692) spent all his life between his birth city and Modena, where he moved in 1674. There is something noteworthy in this geography of the composer: Vitali’s move from Bologna, then part of the Papal States under the administration of Rome, to the smaller but significantly more secular and artistically stimulating Modena, under the rule of the splendid Este family, is suggestive of a desire to achieve greater expressive freedom. Artificii Musicali (Modena, 1689) has given Vitali a respectable place in music history, particularly if one considers the oft supposed idea that it served as inspiration for J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering, J. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) and G.B. Martini’s Saggio Fondamentale Pratico di Contrappunto sopra il Canto Fermo (1774).

Vitali’s Artificii Musicali appeared at a historical crossroad, during the final decades of the 17th century, when there was an explosive rise in instrumental music. There are 40 canons in this work and interspersed among them there are 4 that can be classified as riddle-canons or enigma-canons. These intriguing pieces are accompanied by a brief Latin motto containing the key for their realization, which is left to the reader to decipher (of note, Bach also included two riddle-canons with Latin mottos in the Musical Offering). The final 9 pieces in the Artificii are an eclectic collection of balletti, capricci, a passagallo, and 2 violin sonatas, representative of the main forms of instrumental music at the end of the 17th century. Although Artificii was originally written for violin and bass, Andrea Coen performs here on a harpsichord, and furthermore a harpsichord in equal temperament.

As well as being internationally recognized as a leading interpreter of music new and old, Peter Sheppard Skærved is the only violinist to have performed on the personal violins of Viotti, Paganini, Joachim, Kreisler and Ole Bull. He is a renowned soloist, musicologist, writer, painter and educator at the Royal Academy, and in 2022 appointed as Honorary Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music. This album features perhaps some of the best (certainly best-known) works by the top two violin composers working in Modena, Italy, at the end of the 17th century.

Vitali and Colombi were both quite prolific and produced pieces of wide variety of form, not whittled down to the standard ‘dance suite’ of the middle and late baroque. While the Vitali works have been recorded previously in a version for ensemble, this is the first recording of the pieces in their solo format – and the same applies to the Colombi and anonymous pieces. The album is a fine and fitting sequel to Skærved’s previous solo recording “Florish in the Key” (Athene ATH 23211) which presented contemporaneous (late 17th century) solo violin music from London. “Genuinely intriguing” – Early Music Review; “Excellent… instantly attractive… uniformly high quality” – Infodad)

Introducing “East is East”, the latest album from Infusion Baroque. This fourth album from the Montreal-based ensemble is a fusion of Western Baroque, Persian and Indian music traditions. Featuring collaborators Amir Amiri, Hank Knox, Thibault Bertin-Maghit, Hamin Honari, Vidita Kanniks, and Shawn Mativetsky, the thirteen tracks see Western and Eastern musical traditions find common ground in transcultural music.

In “Bergamasca” and “La Folia”, baroque composers are realized with Persian santur, tombak, and daf alongside the Western harpsicord, violin, cello, and recorder. Amiri’s compositions “Raghse Choobi” and “Aghrab” sees Persian folk melodies from Iran and Azerbaijan brought West, while “Saghi Nameh” and “Cortege” make use of Persian harmony alongside the textures of western counterpoint. Vidita Kanniks brings arrangements of traditional Hindustani melody in “Sandhya Raga”, with her own vocals dancing nimbly above Shawn Mativetsky’s Indian tabla and Baroque and Persian instrumentalists.

With a title inspired by “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling, “East is East” is a collaboration that ignores the borders that divide us and finds the musical common ground that unites us from the farthest corners of the earth.

Find “East is East” wherever you stream your music.