Mezzo-soprano Blandine Staskiewicz Tempesta has, for her first recital disc, chosen to venture into the emotional storms and calms beloved of Baroque composers - notably Vivaldi and Handel - intensely charged arias that captivates listeners still. Ms. Staskiewicz (who has appeared on previous Glossa albums in the company of Herve Niquet and Fabio Bonizzoni) herself contributes an intriguing note about this program's genesis- complete with alluring cover design - but it is the singer's superlative control and expertise in Baroque repertoire that Tempesta best highlights.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This new release contains the beautiful Passiontide score, the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Alessandro Della Ciaia. Roberta Invernizzi displays her virtuosity in performing this work. Invernizzi is accompanied by Franco Pavan’s Laboratorio ‘600.

The Italian Italian violinist, composer and teacher Giovanni Battista Somis (1686-1763), today an obscure figure, studied with, among others, Arcangelo Corelli in the early 18th century. Uncertainty remains as to just how much music he composed, but eight known opuses are extant, including the 12 sonatas of Op. 1. The trio of harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson, violinist Kreeta-Maria Kentala and cellist Lauri Pulakka, who’s prior work for Glossa includes recordings of one Richard Jones (d. 1744) perform.

A further chapter in Emilio Moreno’s championship of the music of Luigi Boccherini opens with a new album on Glossa entitled Apocryphal Sonatas, a quartet of works arranged for violin and keyboard; in them Moreno is joined by the harpsichordist Aarón Zapico. For all that there was a demand in the second half of the eighteenth century for works scored for violin and keyboard from Enlightenment professional musicians and music lovers alike, and for all Boccherini’s fecundity in producing chamber music, only a single set of violin sonatas appears to have been composed by him. Any new work from Boccherini would speedily find itself made available all across Europe in a variety of different guises. It is not surprising, consequently, to find that eighteenth-century contemporaries turned to the trios, quartets and quintets of this then hugely popular composer in order to create transcriptions for violin and keyboard from them – but with Boccherini unmistakably remaining the “author.” Moreno and Zapico enter into the transcription spirit themselves by producing two Boccherini sonatas: these have been derived from a pair of original chamber works with strong Spanish connotations, respectively nicknamed La Tirana and La Seguidilla.

As part of their comprehensive survey of the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana delivered an exceptional version of L’Orfeo, a reading which had been honed by their trailblazing interpretations of the composer’s madrigals. This highly-esteemed recording of the favola in musica – critics applauded and fêted it in many different countries – subsequently dropped out of the catalogue and Glossa is very pleased to have the opportunity to return it there as part of this year’s 450th anniversary commemorations of the composer’s birth. The seductive power of Claudio Cavina’s interpretation lay, in part, in his choice of orchestral colours but also in his shaping of the mythical story of the shared love of Orfeo and Euridice, the latter’s death and descent into the Underworld, and the former’s efforts to rescue from there. Into that reading Mirko Guadagnini excelled with nobleness in the title role, and Emanuela Galli brought sensuality to that of Euridice (and fervour to her Musica), whilst other key roles were taken by Salvo Vitale, Marina De Liso and Josè Maria Lo Monaco. In keeping with his habits of the time Claudio Cavina also found a small part for he himself to sing – the third Shepherd in this case – a reminder not just of his own talents and legacy on record as a singer but of La Venexiana’s tight-knit ensemble approach also. Claudio Cavina’s L’Orfeo has lost nothing of its grandeur in the passing of the years and is recommendable today as when it was first issued in 2006.

Classical Music

With Antonio Caldara's Morte e sepoltura di Christo, released on Glossa just after a new album devoted to Vivaldi's late violin concertos, Fabio Biondi returns to the Italian oratorio, another of his specialities. The Venetians Caldara and Vivaldi may have been contemporaries but their career paths led them in different directions, and Caldara was to spend much time working in Mantua and Rome before securing the position of vice-Kapellmeister for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in Vienna. For the last twenty years of his life Caldara produced copious quantities of oratorios (and operas), adding a rich sense of counterpoint and making use of the broad orchestral colouring offered by the varied instruments available to him at the Imperial court. Composed for the Lenten season in 1724, Morte e sepoltura follows the typical two-part scheme of the time, to a text comprising a series of reflections as from personages involved in some way in the events of the Passion of Christ. Notable is the profusion of solo arias with obliggato instrumental parts. Fabio Biondi's recording, with a team of soloists led by Maria Grazia Schiavo and Silvia Frigato, also includes other echoes of Caldara's Italian past - a pair of motets and instrumental music (a Vivaldi Sonata also makes an appearance) -, and he directs the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, with which he has worked so successfully in the Norwegian orchestra's early music programme since 2006. The album also contains an exemplary essay by the leading Caldara scholar Brian W Pritchard.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Along with the Canto del Caballero (GCD C80101), a vihuela disc also in the care of Jos� Miguel Moreno, this was the first recording of the Glossa label to be released, back in 1993. In a vivacious and colourful tour of music for the stage, tonos humanos and instrumental pieces from 17th-century Spain, the Ensemble La Romanesca (with the soprano Marta Almajano, the gambist Paolo Pandolfo and Jos� Miguel Moreno, playing the guitar, as it's principal contributors) conjured up a legendary disc which continues being an unsurpassed recommendation and, we would even go as far to say, an unsurpassable one.

In a new recording of music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Josetxu Obreg�n's La Ritirata parades it's dazzling vocal and instrumental talents in presenting the four cantatas which involve recorders and violins, together with an additional standalone soprano aria, for a further Glossa Neapolitan-flavored release. Drawn from his well over 800 secular cantatas these works combine fully-integrated, imaginative recitatives, expressive and dramatic arias and colorful and exacting instrumental sinfonias and ritornelli into elegant and compact wholes, and featuring poetic texts which typically followed the aspirations of the Accademia degli Arcadi literary circle initiated in Rome around the turn of the eighteenth century. The scene for Scarlatti's prolific creativity is set by Stefano Russomanno in his booklet essay. The vocal duties are assigned to three leading interpreters of today, mezzo Giuseppina Bridelli, countertenor Filippo Mineccia and soprano Alicia Amo. Rising here to the instrumental challenges set by Scarlatti are long-standing members of La Ritirata, Tamar Lalo (recorder) and Hiro Kurosaki (violin), who are joined on their respective instruments by Michael Form and Pablo Prieto. With cellist Obreg�n, Lalo and Kurosaki had been the leading soloists for La Ritirata's recent Neapolitan Concertos for various instruments release.

Classical Music