Mario Messinis writes of this new release: “In a fine essay on Ivan Vandor, Cristiano Vecchi speaks of “landscapes without history”, while Mario Bortolotto, the first critic to offer an insightful exegesis of the various historical avant-gardes, Viennese included, speaks of “otherness”, but I beg to differ. Vandor, at least the most recent Vandor, lives, like Kurtag, in history; though unlike his fellow Hungarian composer, he has no love of citation. Mitteleurope’s presence is constantly evoked, but as echo or resonance, not as literal quotation. The neo-classical passion for the ancient is absent; but glimmers of a lost world with which Vandor is in dialogue are present. After the experimental research of his youth and the improvisations with the group Musica Elettronica Viva, Vandor took refuge in an ecstatic limbo, like that of the Duo for viola and piano, or the cello pieces included in this album. The syncretism of the Klavierquartett is remarkable, as is the emotional cantabile, close to Bartokian elegy, of the string Trio, the masterpiece of this collection. Time is recurrently held in suspension, as in Webern’s Bagatellen op. 9. There is no trace in Vandor’s work of the Tibetan Buddhism which fascinated him as a musicologist; his is a personality with two autonomous souls not engaged in dialogue; so much so that all facile ethnic referencing or orientalism is avoided. His is a solitary world, suspended on the brink of interiority. Listening to this music reveals a touching spiritual joy. Vandor is an untimely Maestro. In dialogue with the shadows, he is not afraid to recreate the past, to live in lyrical intimacy the return of the forgotten.”

In Ivan Fedele’s long, rich artistic career of (this catalogue opens in 1980 and since then has added more than 160 titles) it is not possible to distinguish true phases. We do not know periods in which his creative interest has been concentrated predominantly, still less exclusively, on a linguistic context or a specific instrumental ensemble. We can perhaps consider as exceptions the extraordinary flowering of concertante pieces between 1996 and 1999, or that of orchestral works in the last few years, mostly concentrated in two series of pieces entitled Lexikon and Syntax. Otherwise, it has been a continuous intertwining of forms and formations, the physical substances that from time to time have best responded to the results of Fedele’s uninterrupted research. However, it is true that in the last four years (starting from 2012) he has developed a “feeling” (as the composer himself described it) for percussion, which is accompanied by a renewed interest in the piano (above all in the more complex two-piano structure) and a new, intense flowering of his never neglected “electronic” vein. This CD testifies to this absolutely contemporary vein of Ivan Fedele.

Capriciosi Affetti takes us on a journey around the instrumental sonata in early 17th-century Venice through two and three-part compositions with continuo by Biagio Marini, Giovanni Battista Fontana, Dario Castello, Giovanni Picchi, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Marco Uccellini. Ranging from the tradition of the Canzon da Sonar and the Musica a Ballo, our journey certifies the wealth of experimentation within the sonata concertante, with its kaleidoscopic variety of contrasts. Along with the outcomes of vocal music, musing around the affetti played a pivotal part in the development of instrumental writing that was as idiomatic as it was advanced from a technical, timbral, and sound point of view. Composers called affetti those peculiar technical and execution modalities of expression through which instrumental music, lacking a written text, wished to give an abstract representation of the variety of accents and everchanging inflections within human passions and frames of mind.

Roberto Fabbriciani's journey continues into the depths of the work of Luis de Pablo (1930-2021). After the CD dedicated to the flute works of the great Spanish composer, the CD Pensieri is now released which sees Roberto Fabbriciani, a flautist who has collaborated with the major composers of our time, engaged with the Basque National Orchestra directed by José Ramon Encinar. At the opening is the piece that gives the album its title, Pensieri, Rhapsody for flute and orchestra composed in the years 2013-2014, in four movements. Followed by Flauta, tú voladora from 2020 for flute in C, Solo Kunst (2000-2017), Three fugues from “Die Kunst der Fuge” by J.S. Bach for clarinet solo in the flute version by Roberto Fabbriciani and, at the end of this intense listening journey, Sólo un paso (1974) for a flutist and an actor, with the elaboration of the flute part by Roberto Fabbriciani. Between unexpected sounds and very personal musical solutions, the album presents a program of great expressive richness, and offers itself as a heartfelt homage to a central figure in the history of Spanish music and, more generally, of the contemporary musical panorama.

For their third recording for label Stradivarius, the duo Singer & Fischer have chosen to devote themselves to four Hispanic-flavored works. With little original repertoire despite the opuses that various composers have written for them in recent years, transcriptions, arrangements, and other adaptations are usual in the ensemble’s work. However, not all works are easy to adapt, and the choice of pieces from among the ‘possibilities’ is often a difficult one. The transcriptions on this recording are the result of a process of reflection that goes back to the duo’s genesis. Their first attempts at De Falla or Granados took place in the 90s, a time when the youthfulness of the performers certainly contributed to the enthusiasm essential to any musical interpretation, but when a lack of experience was a brake on any idea of immortalizing their concert attempts.

Since then, the Singer & Fischer duo have taken the time to mature, and this latest recording is the result of over thirty years of playing together. Whether in terms of sound timbre, phrasing or balance, the ensemble has achieved a musical union made possible by its longevity, proof that despite all the acceleration and frenzy in today’s world, some goals take time.

The CD "Agua & Vinho Sentimentals: Moods for Flute and Guitar" offers a wide and varied anthology of pieces by different authors, from classical to contemporary, revisited by the personal sensitivity of Carolina Dello Iacono (flute) and Antonio Grande (guitar). In the intense instrumental dialogue, the publication becomes a singular musical story that explores different artistic languages, from the song by Egberto Gismonti (that gives the album’s title) to works by Ada Gentile, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Francis Poulenc, and others, between enveloping atmospheres and moments that open up unexpected sonic horizons. The protagonists of this particular listening journey, in a polyphony of ideas, voices, and creative instances, are Carolina Dello Iacono and Antonio Grande, musicians with great experience and extensive artistic activity.

A new precious chapter has been added to Mariangela Vacatello's project of complete recording of Alexander Scriabin’s piano sonatas. A record series, to which the second volume is now added, that becomes a virtuosic journey into the world of sonatas where, as Guido Salvetti illustrates in the accompanying notes: "They thus reflect the composer's entire artistic itinerary: from the fiery romantic gestures of Liszt to the dissolution of rationality in the more symbolic esotericism." The sonatas date from 1891, in the last months of study at the Moscow Conservatory, and 1913.
In this new publication, Mariangela Vacatello delves with a personal touch into the creative plots of the sonatas n. 2 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8, revealing its expressive complexities and countless emotional cues. A new record release that reflects the intense and virtuosic exploratory research of the pianist, an opportunity to rediscover the creative and human universe of the Russian composer in its expressive and narrative density".

The piano music of Patrick Dheur. From the very first hearing, Patrick Dheur’s music is comprehensible and reveals a personal style that attracts the attention of music lovers sensitive to the most diverse expressivities. Composed and ordered on a characteristic melodic sense, it is distinguished by forms stemming from romantic models which are linked to concrete and sometimes pictorial ideas.
The personality of the pianist is in the image of his musical writing. Free from conventions, fashions and trends, he keeps the strength of traditions to adapt to the rapid evolution of ideas and technologies and to the new proposals of modern societies. The requirement of the virtuoso’s technical mastery is inseparable from the interpreter’s responsibility to the composer. In this collection dedicated exclusively to his piano music, we feel this essential conjugation between the man, the artist, the virtuoso and the composer. The fruit of a long experience acquired through his career as a concert performer in a wide variety of repertoires, his music is today of growing interest to the public as well as to numerous soloists and orchestras who find in his style a new destination for their musical development and pleasure.
Patrick Dheur has also composed numerous chamber music works (trio, quartet, quintet, sextet), specific pieces for violin, flute, cello, viola, clarinet as well as Symphonies, Cantatas and Concertos for soloists and string orchestra which are regularly performed and recorded. His conceptions of the art of composition were the subject of a book entitled “Composing with the World. Seven notes to understand each other” which he wrote in 2019, published by Snel.

All of his compositions as well as various recordings are listed on the website http://dheur.org

One hundred years of Romanticism, about sixty years of postromanticism and another sixty of filologic research and adhesion to "original versions" of past musical compositions got used to us badly.
Romanticism conditioned us to think that what was written by the hand of a composer has to be untouchable, a sacred document that's perfect like it is; postromanticism convinced us that this idea had to be applied to any artwork, even the ones that were written before the '800s; lastly, the meritorious and sacrosanct philologic enforcement to the research of the 'original text' have definitely forced us to believe that the only 'original version' of a composition is the one that reproduces exactly the text, recovered with all the tricks modern and performed with instruments as close as possible to the 'original' instruments of the time in which the composition was, in fact, composed.
These three elements, put together, even if they seem contradictory to each other, actually go to form a perfect storm, a kind of explosive mixture that makes people look askance artistic achievements such as the one proposed by the program of this CD.
But fortunately, for some, very little indeed, time, we have awakened from these paths so tremendously binding, starting right from the end, from the last step. And so 'historically informed' executions, those in which, that is, the performers tell you “I know very well that I am playing with a modern instrument an ancient music, but I also know that…”.
Music has always been there, especially chamber music, which is done at home, among friends with the mere pleasure of playing together, is written for variable organics. And even if we find the name of one or more instruments on the title page of the critical edition, the author is actually giving the eventual executor only an 'executive suggestion', as if he was telling us: “check the range of your instrument, and if with it you can play the notes that are written, this song is for you”. Be it melodies or accompaniment chords. This has always been the meaning of chamber music. Making music together for someone to listen to, or just for the pleasure of making it.
Maria Chiara Mazzi

Ars Ludi is a percussion ensemble with variable staff which, since its inception (founded in 1987 by Antonio Caggiano and Gianluca Ruggeri), has embarked on an active artistic itinerary on two interpretative dimensions.On the one hand, the proposition of the contemporary repertoire for percussion, realized with an international concert activity (USA, Mexico, Germany, China, Sweden, France, Spain, Malta, Greece, Turkey, Algeria, Kenya, Scotland and Switzerland in some these occasions has recorded for national radio and television stations.) interpreting composers such as J. Cage, K. Stockhausen, B. Bartok, G. Battistelli, L. Andriessen, E. Varese, S. Reich, W. Duckworth, A. Curran, G. Scelsi, L. Berio,V. Heyn and C. Ambrosini) and encouraging the repertoire of Italian authors with commissions and first performances (L. Ceccarelli, P. Esposito, M. Lupone, L. Bianchini, M. Tadini, M. Cardi, T. Battista, N. Sani, M. D’Amico, C. Boccadoro, M. Dall’Ongaro, F. Filidei, L. Pagliei, L. Gregoretti, C. Galante, A. Solbiati and many others).
This quality of interpretation pushed the leading composers of our time to choose Ars Ludi for their musical research: often the ensemble becomes a coauthor. A fertile interaction that brought the ensemble to enlarge its percussive instrumentation (Ars Ludi often builds its own instruments) and to increase the amount of percussionists, often resorting to their students, or other kinds of artists from Theater, Cinema or even writers, dancers, painters, electronic musicians.
A web of artistic experiences that led Ars Ludi to win in 2022 one of the most desirable awards in the European music scene: the Silver Lion at the Biennale of Venice.

Guido Alberto Fano’s vocal chamber works form an important part of his musical output and mark the three crucial phases of his artistic growth. His earliest songs date from the last years of the 19th century, during his period of training and the start of his musical career in Bologna, using texts by local poets such as Angelina de Leva, Luigi Arturo Bresciani and Giuseppe Lipparini. Then, during the first fifteen years of the 20th century, his most “experimental” years, Fano began to draw inspiration from some of the most distinguished names in Italian poetry, including Boccaccio, Carducci and Pascoli. Finally, his last creative period, after the 1930s, saw a return to the vocal genre with seven pieces on poems by D’Annunzio and one by Carducci, all written in 1945. Fano usually calls his vocal compositions “canti”, a choice often shared by his colleagues of the so-called “generation of the eighties”. On the whole, Fano’s music reveals a commitment to avoid stereotypes and surrendering to the vestiges of easy appeal, demonstrating the composer’s sensitivity in responding to the ethical demands of modernity, with that determined solicitude which characterised the inner workings of the great composers of the early 20th century.
- Vitale Fano

In the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist period, when the light of the end was still far off, Malipiero completed a long-awaited undertaking: an edition of the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi. Its last volume, the sixteenth, came out in 1942 at the height of the war. The edition contained the sacred production that the publisher Vincenti had assembled in the collection Messa a 4 voci et salmi (1650).

Quartetto Sincronie’s choice to include an arrangement of Monteverdi’s Mass, alternating the parts with Malipiero’s work, is yet another example of reinvention-creation that Malipiero would likely have appreciated. In the composers’ poetics, instruments are asked to sing as voices, and so the opposite—voices translated to instruments—is fitting. Philological rigor was, after all, foreign to Malipiero’s worldview. Instead, the composer spoke of his relationship with Monteverdi as a kind of psychic channeling: finding synchronicity within the synchrony of listening, which dissolves the distance of centuries. The Mass for Four Voices is thus split into parts throughout the record, but it remains possible to orient oneself. The cohesion is melodic: there’s a descending tetrachord G-F-E-D at the beginning of the Kyrie that returns in various guises (inverted, diminished, augmented), articulating the contrapuntal fabric of the different movements. The listener can thus follow this pathway, from the Gloria to the Agnus Dei, in a zigzag that turns Monteverdi the sacred “refrain” to Malipiero’s profane cycle of quartets.

Music has its own language. Its beauty immediately discloses emotions but sometimes also conceals its meanings. The musician is compelled by this dualism to make choices, which are not always painless. To enhance one of them entails attenuating what is immediately perceptible, in order to highlight what, although existing, is not. This peculiarity makes both studying and performing a piece difficult, and must always be taken into account. This often occurs in Johann Sebastian Bach. He is always searching for some kind of absolute truth. However, we are not given to grasp it in its entirety and in its incomparable complexity: only through continuous research and assiduous work we are able to comprehend a small part of it. The art of music resembles an extraordinary journey encompassing infinite dimensions; the most important aspect is treasuring what we experience and discover along the way, not just reaching the destination, because even then we would realize that the journey is far from over. As Bach suggests in his Musical Offering, there is only one road: quaerendo invenietis, seeking you will find; this is what I have tried to accomplish in this new recording project dedicated to the genius from Eisenach. The anthological choice of this CD stems from the need to provide a significant overview of this interpretative philosophy, which allows us to shed new light on the kaleidoscopic world of Bach. My previous recording project “Domenico Scarlatti alio modo” followed this same criterion, albeit on different bases.

It is indeed a pleasure to find myself writing the introduction to this record programme, the result of an extended gestation spanning more than a decade of my musical research. The common thread of this project is the search for a personal reflection in the mirror of the anthropomorphic musical instrument par excellence, the human voice. Finding a parallelism between vocal cords and guitar strings, by arranging originally vocal works. This primordial and initiatory sound in the communication between living beings is here understood as a medium that goes under the musical epidermis, towards a more anthropologically horizontal pulsation and resonance. Over the centuries, from the Gregorian chant onwards, we have witnessed a fervent “musically oriented” approach to sound and metrics, in favour of instrumental performance and dance. However, in my experience, the most effective musical expressions have always been characterised by a communicativeness that goes beyond the instrument, revealing an expressive flow that, unmediated, takes us back to the apparent naturalness of the vocal expression. Similarly, from the opposite perspective, it was enlightening for me to listen to Carmelo Bene’s recordings and discover that Valerio Binasco studied The Tempest using the metronome, to get in contact with “the musicality of speech”. The intention to interbreed with the human voice has been and still is for me an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This research, which can be extended to compositions of all epochs, is presented here in a compact version, through the arrangement of works by two authors belonging to German Romanticism.

The three Suites recorded on this CD (BWV 1007, BWV 1008 and BWV 1010) were transcribed for guitar by the performers themselves, following a practice customary for Bach and absolutely familiar to him (the Fifth Suite for cello has come down to us in two versions, one for cello and one for lute: we are not sure which came first). One should therefore recognise the full aesthetic legitimacy of the guitar transcription of these compositions, a practice, moreover, that has now been established for decades. This procedure is ultimately legitimised by the primacy, in Bach’s language, of the harmonic and contrapuntal dimension over their sonic realisation, a primacy that led Ferruccio Busoni, for whom the concept of “transcription” occupies a position of absolute centrality in his aesthetic thought, to transcribe for piano not only numerous compositions for organ by Thomaskantor, but also the Chaconne from the Second Partita in D minor for solo violin. With specific regard to the guitar, one cannot fail to mention the name of Andrés Segovia, who transcribed for his instrument and recorded in 1946 the highly famous Chaconne.