Italian Perspectives - 20th & 21st Centuries Works for Two G
Stradivarius
CD
$16.99Aug 16, 2024
The album's repertoire explores music for two guitars written by Italian composers over the last 50 years. The peculiarity of this program lies in it's eclectic variety, which ranges from more traditional influences, rooted in the past, to distinctly contemporary expressions, exploring in which ways the guitar duo has been approached by different authors. This album features prestigious names: Franco Donatoni, one of the most important Italian composers of the second half of the 20th century; Alvaro Company, guitarist and composer, among the most authoritative students of the famous Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia; Giorgio Colombo Taccani, an extremely active composer in the contemporary music scene, awarded in 2023 with the Golden Guitar for Composition, awarded as part of the 28th International Guitar Conference in Milan. The album boasts numerous first ever recordings: Algo n. 2 by Franco Donatoni, Sonata II by Franco Margola, Colloquio by Bianca Maria Furgeri, Winter day by Vittorio Fellegara, Piccoli rainbowi by Gilberto Bosco, as well as Ricercare by Aldo Clementi, recorded for the first time in the version for two guitars elaborated by Andrea Monarda. Furthermore, Consonancias y Redobles by Azio Corghi (a piece with several possible instrumental destinations) is recorded for the first time by a guitar duo. This project finally marks the recovery of a piece of great value. An image (thinking of Schubert) of Alvaro Company, until now neglected by the guitar world.
In 2013 a group of Krakow-based instrumentalists shared the stage as part of the European Workshop for Contemporary Music, conducted by maestro Rudiger Bohn. Having then played together at Darmstadt's Internationale Ferienkurse fur Nee Musik, the musicians established an independent body. A couple of events held in a community center by one of the town's exit roads and in a then neglected theater marked the beginnings of Spoldzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble, a group who specializes in performing new music. This is the ensemble's first entirely self-curated and self-produced album. It includes compositions which shaped the group's identity.
Casella: Divertimento for Fulvia / Iorio, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana
Naxos
CD
$19.99Jan 13, 2017
This programme of four colourful, contrasting but complementary works for small orchestra celebrates the lighter side of four twentieth-century Italian composers, centring on Alfredo Casella’s Divertimento for Fulvia, composed for his young daughter. Casella’s friend Gian Francesco Malipiero wrote Oriente immaginario (Imaginary Orient) for a Futurist play by Achille Ricciardi (1884-1923). Franco Donatoni once called his simply-titled Musica (Music) ‘kind of Schoenberg gone a bit neoclassical’ – but also with a great sense of humour – while Giorgio Federico Ghedini’s Concerto grosso is a twentieth-century tribute to both Bach and Beethoven.