Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Giovanni Battista Constanzi was an Italian composer who held the position of Maestro di Cappella of the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This album investigates Constanzi’s instrumental music, and includes seven sonatas for cello. The album also includes Giovanni Sollima’s Il mandataro. Italian cellist Giovanni Sollima performs these works. As a composer, he has composed a great deal of chamber works, orchestral works, and even operas and ballets.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In the course of his illustrious career, Fabio Biondi has nurtured a remarkable empathy with Italian music from across many centuries, but strikingly so with the early Baroque violin sonata repertory, the development of which was dramatically propelled into the future by Arcangelo Corelli with his Op 5 collection. It is this empathy possessed by Biondi which has inspired the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (from it's bowed instrument collection) to make him a loan of the precious 1690 "Tuscan" violin made by Antonio Stradivari, for this Glossa recording. Another skill possessed by Biondi is his deft assemblage of programmes, whether for concert or for record, and this new release of early eighteenth-century violin works touches on the impact that Corelli's music had on music-making in Dresden, Venice, Padua, London and Amsterdam, to name just a few of the destinations affected as the fame of "Arcangelo Bolognese" fanned out from Rome across Europe. With a continuo team from his Europa Galante ensemble, Biondi plays sonatas by Vivaldi, Corelli, Geminiani, Tartini and Locatelli, and a Ciaccona by Veracini. Recorded in Rome, on an instrument which was originally made for the Florentine court of Ferdinando de' Medici (and which, over time, has survived all manner of vicissitudes on it's journey to Rome!), Fabio Biondi expertly captures the flavor of the eighteenth-century violin sonata.

This new reease features the 1685 St. John Passion setting by Gaetano Veneziano. Countertenor Raffaele Pe excels in the extremely demanding role of the Evangelist. Antonio Florio conducts the Capella Neapolitana for this recording. This album includes a booklet essay by Dinko Fabris.

Classical Music