A double concerto is quite unusual. It is a concerto featuring two performers, as opposed to the usual single performer in the solo role, and the Orchestra. Hence, this represents one of the most interesting traits of this release. The album opens with a Concerto by Marco Nodari, Brescia composer, who in this work proposes to innovate the consolidated forms, reshaping them with musical situations coming from music history and with contaminations from other kind of music, thus creating an inclusive and unique style. The “Double concerto” for cello, guitar and Orchestra by Marco Nodari has a particular subtitle: “romantic” intended as “possible balance” between tradition and modernity. The work continues with Piazzolla, who has been defined as El asesino del Tango by the conservators of the Argentine dance who wanted to denigrate him through that title. However, he is one of the most remarkable compositors in the international panorama. Piazzolla created the innovative nuevo tango, characterized by various rhythmic and sound interweaving, resulting from Piazzolla creativity and previous other experiences. All of this stands for this beautiful album’s theme. “Secretos de Buenos Aires” by Miguel Bareilles is a suite for cello and guitar composed in 2014 and arranged by Bareilles himself for duo and symphonic Orchestra in 2017. The Argentine composer loves merging different genres such as chamber music and classical orchestral music with elements from Jazz, Tango and South American rhythms.

Fabula ut was born as a collection of nine fairy tales in the form of poetic improvisations for voice and imaginary flute, so that the poet glimpses a fantastical way to escape, together through the spoken word, towards differing unfinished scenarios. The verses and stanzas expand and contract in an attempt to anchor each moment of the story to the more consistent sound in a continuous recourse of sense and nonsense of the word, word which tends to dissolve and then emerge again almost redounding. A poetic fairy tale that does not end and that instead opens up new fairy tales and new sounds, the enigmatic and crystalline vibration of the word itself. Berdondini's poem brings together the compositions of ten musicians who combine ten distinct flute pieces with each single Fabula ut tale.

Daniele Guaschino was born in Italy in 1975 and lives in France since 1996. He studied ethnomusicology and composition, and he mainly works with musicians, directors and choreographers from the French art scene. His music follows a path where different languages and systems, as well as acoustic and electronic materials, structurally co-live, always looking for a fundamental principle and a uniform aesthetic. This album features duos with respected contemporary artists, including Alfredo Mola, Fortunato D’Orio, Francois Merville, Quentin Biardeau, Rishab Prasanna, Sefoudi Kouyate, and Szuhwa Wu.

Danilo Comitini was born in England in 1986.He started studying piano and composition at age of 10. He graduated in piano at conservatory "G.Rossini" in Pesaro and then in composition with Lamberto Lugli. He specialized in Milano with Alessandro Solbiati and in Rome at "Accademia di Santa Cecilia" with Ivan Fedele. He has won several composition competitions and his music has been rewarded by personalities like Frédéric Durieux, Claudio Ambrosini and Daniele Zanettovich. On his new album Find Him we hear seven of his compositions, performed by renowned artists including the WunderKammer Orchester, cellist Francesco Dillon, vocalist Angelo Bonazzoli, pianist Roberta Pandolfi, and more.

“The Encyclopedias of Music would do well to add Montanari name to those of Cathy Berberian and Gabriella Bartolomei. Fantastic in contending with Ceccarelli’s concrete-digital sound [...].” (Mario Gamba) “The worlds of sound and words created by Montanari, an extraordinary vocal acrobat, enthral and frighten their listeners, instilling bliss and turmoil, uneasiness and freedom. [...] Remaining within a chiaroscuro, hieratic and subtle, she is a shadow who comes from the reign of death, or of poetry. [...] Martinelli’s stage poem has an enormous illuminating force, and in its concise staging it seems to be able to move mountains.” (Renate Klett) “This monodrama interpreted by Montanari confirms the musical inclination not only of her ars dicendi and stage art, but also Martinelli’s dramaturgy [...], an excellent “libretto” whose inner workings include alliterations constructed to be “sung” by Ermanna. [...] Ceccarelli’s acousmatic music, with its violent waves of sound, hints at something catastrophic.” (Emilio Sala)

Innovation and tradition involve conflicting criteria, and Alberto Caprioli belongs to that group of composers who render their task more difficult by deciding to meet both kinds at the same time. Having a perfect knowledge of tradition, up to and including it's most recent manifestations, his strategy is to pursue the new, not as a goal but as a medium, in order to express the authenticity of his worldview through an original organization of sounds. In practice, tradition has never sounded like that. In listening to this music, you do not feel nostalgia for the past. A fully contemporary awareness is the only attitude on the part of the composer that can come to terms with the only time we have available to us, namely the present. This release is a coherent collection of seven pieces that make use of different combinations of the same instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano.From the point of view of the performance as well, the coherence of the record is enhanced by the presence of the same group of musicians, the Ex Novo Ensemble, who perform all pieces under the guidance of the same conductor, namely the composer himself. The overall unity of purpose is palpable.

A monograph on the chamber music for guitar by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is not a new operation, nor is it particularly original: the numbers of works that the Maestro bequeathed to the six strings significantly occupy the entire last season of the Florentine composer’s life and work. It was evident in his perception that “chamber music would be the salvation of the classical guitar”. However, this album is not born from a compiling urgency, from a need to combine a catalog and observe it with fetishism in its entirety, - after all, there are many chamber pieces missing from the entire corpus, not to mention the vocal chamber music and the music for two guitars, here only partially addressed. Rather, from the desire to contemplate in a different perspective some elements of a rich legacy that still today stimulates and fascinates the interpreters who approach it. The title “Appunti” (Notes) is anything but casual, as are the works chosen to represent it. In recounting this repertoire, my will - with the help of a homogeneous time span going from 1950 to the last days of the Maestro’s life - has been to highlight the possibilities of salvation that the guitar assumes through chamber music, with compositional skills that can still be defined as exemplary acts of bravura and happy inspiration, unsurpassed to this day. As on a notebook, the notes collected take shape, and become the argument for possibilities, then become thesis, evidence, and, eventually, memory.

Why make a recording nowadays? - It is a question increasingly difficult to answer to. CDs are now only an option, among other more agile and customizable, to find and to listen to music. But then why not rethink this object, swirling support system in your home or car player, such as a carousel? A Carousel of fantasies where to join your imagination with friends and companions of a path, pictured together in a ride. This album is the goal, and also a new starting point, of a work that Roberto Genova has distributed in several years among many activities of a musician today, being always in touch with musicians and composers presented here. The personal relationship between composer and performer is actually the greatest luxury in doing contemporary msuic, but especially for solo pieces, it is also the laste and decisive value that gives meaning to the artistic work of both of them. With the obvious exception of Scelsi's pieces, this direct relationship links the different kinds of music to listen to, and makes the testimony of contemporary music alive in a major European crossroads.

ANSER is a double star, a binary system where two different stars orbit around a common center, becoming a single entity. So the duo featuring Virginia Sutera and Alberto Braida consists of two different identities searching and moving around a common concept of music. Their whole work and music proposal is binary as it moves along two tracks as well: free improvisation and extemporaneous re-proposition of original scores. Both ways, ANSER music is created in the very moment it is performed, as composition and execution perfectly correspond.

If you thought Hendrix on string quartet was a neat idea, you owe it to yourself to hear Scodanibbio's breathtakingly psychedelic, ferociously driven & Roll. Eight minutes of untrammeled Woodstock mayhem.

Since the 1970s, the instrumental repertoire for double bass has been enriched with a considerable amount of new literature. We are facing what can be defined as the “renaissance” of the double bass, which revolves around key players such as Fernando Grillo, Franco Petracchi, Joëlle Léandre, and Stefano Scodanibbio. The disruption with the virtuosity of previous solo literature is radical: the emulation of the expressiveness of the other string instruments (which increased a quasi-complex of inferiority towards violinists and cellists) definitively gives way to the specificities of the double bass, so that the new literature becomes idiomatic. This collection of pieces therefore aims to be an update to the traditional double bass repertoire. In fact, it brings together works composed starting from the 1970s by some of the most representative Italian composers of the second half of the 1900s. The pieces in question have had, for various reasons, a large consensus among double bass players, and continue to have more and more, surviving the oblivion of the first performance, and fully entering the corpus of “standard” literature for solo double bass.

REVIEW:

This disc showcases contemporary additions to the double bass repertoire since 1970 which have conclusively entered the repertory of players specializing in modern music. Berio extensively revised Sequenza XIV for cello into XIVb for double bass in collaboration with the late, much-lamented Stefano Scodanibbio. From its transcription of the Gàta Béra drum in its arrestingly rhythmic opening, and again later on, using finger taps on strings and the body of the instrument, to its extensive use of natural harmonics and endless variety of sonorous timbres, at times suggesting registration on an organ, the work is an absolute tour de force, immensely exciting to listen to, and incredibly difficult to play. The Scelsi is composed of deeply resonant closely adjacent tones, on an instrument tuned in extreme scordatura, interacting to produce overtones and beats which sound like electronic effects. Donatoni's Lem is a cascading tumult of short, irascible fragments, varying wildly in register, dynamic, and timbre over short timespans; with its compendium of extended techniques, it has been used extensively as a compulsory competition piece. Sciarrino's piece is shocking. Declared unplayable - even by the composer - when it first appeared, the work turns the instrument into an ensemble of brass, percussion, and strange, primitive signals, exploring an extraordinary range of polyphonic timbres in a previously unimagined soundworld. If you thought Hendrix on string quartet was a neat idea, you owe it to yourself to hear Scodanibbio's breathtakingly psychedelic, ferociously driven & Roll. Eight minutes of untrammeled Woodstock mayhem.

-- Records International

In the course of the 18th century, and in almost all ofEurope, the lute, the main instrument of the 16th century, gradually decliption was for the German-speaking countries, where still, on the threshold of the 19th century, it was widespread in chamber ensembles and as a solo instrument. The outstanding figure in this late season was Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), born in Grottkau, the Habsburg city today is known as Grodkow and situated in Poland. His first teacher was his father, Johann Jacob, a capable musician.

Agoraphilia is an invitation to raise awareness and love for open spaces, spaces of Being and visual spaces. This is the reason why this work offers a strong synergy between musicians, eras, repertoires and literary hymns, responding to the particular situation of closure and forced introversion caused by the pandemic events. The Duo Agorà, formed by Domenico Luciano on Saxophones and Eugenio Catone on Piano, was born in 2008 with the aim of exploring new repertoires, starting from sharing the urban sound space and from the sensorial message that the languages of new music bring to the modern society. Defined by the critics as two courageous pioneers (criticaclassica.it) and exceptional virtuosos (Novi List), they propose original works composed by living artists, but also pieces composed by themselves or dedicated to them, using different types of saxophones and electronic instruments during their concerts. They received numerous awards in international chamber music competitions including TIM competition, Rovere d'Oro Award, Zinetti Award.

Although little known, the literature for two violins has an ancient history, that on one hand refers to the educational purpose of playing together and reciprocally listening to each other, and on the other hand refers to folk tradition. The compositions featured on this album truly move within all these different perspectives: they are in part folk music pieces, in part pieces with a didactic aim, but above all they are dialogs with a high chamber music value. Bartók and Prokofiev, with the Forty-four duets and the Sonata for two violins gifted us with two cornerstones of the literature for these instruments in the narrow space of two years, 1931 and 1932, opening this repertoire to new textures and new languages.

The “sympathetic madness” was exactly that spark that continued to distinguish the instrumental production of the “Neapolitans” and which also transpires from the literature by Barbella dedicated to almandol, an instrument very dear to aristocratic circles as can now be deduced, in a self-evident way, from recent studies on this tool always betrayed by a history that relegated it exclusively to a “street” or just “popular” practice. The Six Duos were composed for 2 violins or 2 mandolins, as was customary in the practice of the time, which saw the same compositions performed on different instruments. Barbella also composed music for mandolin alone. Although his writing is less idiomatic than that, for example, of his fellow countryman Giovanni Battista Gervasio (c. 1725 - c. 1785, himself a mandolinist), Barbella manages to combine a refined compositional style, which he learned in the Neapolitan conservatories, with techniques and the pizzicato sound of the new mandolin, creating a new way of writing, with harmonies and sounds that had probably never been heard before. The listener can still perceive this new sound today in the performance offered to us on this CD, where the choice of the musicians was to perform the Duos not with two violins or two mandolins, but with a violin and a mandolin. A sound that we can legitimately imagine to be not so far from that heard by the listeners and performers of the time, given the great diffusion that the instrument had throughout Europe, as the iconography of the time illustrates.

Dmitrij Dmitrievic Shostakovich was one of the most influential, praised and widely performed composers of the twentieth century: his unmistakable style has left an indelible mark on the aesthetic taste of the modern listener and on the DNA of the contemporary orchestra. Nevertheless, up to this day, his piano works have been rarely played by performers and listened to by the public, almost obscured by the exceptional nature of his extensive chamber and symphonic production. Considering his outstanding ease of writing and well-proven ability to compose music under all kinds of circumstances – even unfavorable ones –, Shostakovich’s piano production for piano appears relatively small and, above all, sporadic. These pages are not less extraordinary because of that. On the contrary, many of them show a degree of ambition and depth of purpose that are not second to those of his chamber and symphonic masterpieces.