Within this album the “Insolito 8cento” duo (Angelo de Magistris, violin and Rosaria Dina Rizzo, piano) is rediscovering a little-known feature of the great Belcanto master Gaetano Donizetti: his chamber works dedicated to the violin, an instrumental production little mentioned and often completely ignored. In fact Donizetti never ceased to deal with the composition of instrumental chamber music, giving life to brilliant works that, same as for his vocal works, testify his extraordinary creative vein in which one can recognize great inspiration, almost like a continuous improvisation, yet always refined and elegant as well as completely devoid of those formal negligence typical of the ‘utility music' or composed for mere exercise or pastime.

By being present and available in every corner of the planet the stone stands as a witness to the human and natural history. It appears to be as a sort of “geo cultural Esperanto”, a constant that binds distant, in space and time, worlds and cultural traditions by cutting across with a horizontal, diagonal, and vertical movement. This work of the Sonar Trio is inspired by such universal and supratemporal nature of the stone. Marco Delisi (flute), Roberto D’Urbano (clarinet) and Vanessa Sotgiu (piano) are professionals of undoubted skills who are measuring themselves with pages of contemporary music that traces back to a link betweenWest and East, between ascending musical languages of accultured European tradition, and sound vestiges of ancient, possibly primordial and archetypal, character. With the exception of the first two, all tracks of the Lithos album are dedicated to the Sonar Trio. The suggested path unfolds therefore between very human vibrations and pure sound solicitations, between hidden suggestions originating from a prehuman world, refined punctuations of a contemporary dialogue, in which the material element is always somewhat present. The trio brilliantly manages to achieve the double goal of reconciling the human with the primordial and history with nature. It does also recompose the sensory threads that hold together sounds and colours, visions and listening.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678, in a period during which the cello was acquiring popularity in the world of concerts and an important role in musical entertainment. The Red Priest ennobled the soul of the cello. It gave him the inspiration for no less than twenty-seven concertos for solo cello, a concerto for cello and bassoon (rv 409 in E minor), another one for two cellos, string instruments and basso continuo (rv 531 in G minor), a considerable number of works with the indication “violoncello obbligato”, and nine sonatas for cello and basso continuo (in addition to the beginning of a tenth sonata which has been lost). For these works, musicological research has often placed the name of Vivaldi side by side with that of Antonio Vandini, whose six sonatas for cello and basso continuo have been recorded for Tactus by Bologna Baroque in 2018 (TC 692202). For the recording, we used two cellos of the Fondazione Orpheon that belong to Maestro Jose Vasquez: a cello of the Montagnana School (circa 1750) for the solo part and a Simone Cimapane from 1692 (that according to some written evidence had belonged to Arcangelo Corelli’s orchestra) for the basso continuo part.

The collection presented in this recording by the voice of the mezzo-soprano Manuela Custer – accompanied by Raffaele Cortesi on the piano and the strings of the Dafne Quartet – offers us a series of valuable composers trying their hand at the genre of vocal chamber music. The common denominator of the compositions presented are the Dante Alighieri rhymes – certainly one of the greatest poets of all time – whose immortal verses inspired generations of artists over the centuries. Starting from the notes by Gioachino Rossini, the album then focuses on the historical period going from the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, including, alongside famous names (Giacomo Puccini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco) a series of less known composers to the general public but of extraordinary importance for the understanding of this historical period.

After the album dedicated to chamber music [TC931901] by the composer Luciano Simoni – passed away in 2010 – in this cd Tactus is presenting his Missa Solemnis, a large composition dedicated in 1987 to the Pope Giovanni Paolo ii (premiere in Bologna and later in Poland in Wroclaw), immediately enjoying considerable success. Simoni’s Mass certainly reflects the inner needs of a believing composer who adheres with passion and faith to the depth of the sacred texts, as his own words are explaining to us: «What is represented in my Missa is the descent of God towards man, who is then raised towards Him […], in my work there is the anxiety and fear of contemporary mankind, there is the constant, unceasing human tension towards salvation, where only Christian hope can be a safe haven.».

Among the entertainments with which the Bavarian nobles of the 18th century occupied their monotonous and idle daily life, in addition to gambling, tobacco smoking and reading, the mandora and calichon are often mentioned. The latter were lutes, with only 6- (or even 5-) courses of strings, which – being much less demanding than the contemporary German 13-course lute – became among the favourite instruments of the German, Austrian and Bohemian aristocracy, including women, who were generally excluded from professional instrumental music.

The larger 8-course calichon, due to its versatility was widely used as a continuo-playing instrument in chamber ensembles and orchestras, especially in monasteries and among the clergy. It is precisely an original gallichone of 1754 the instrument used by the specialist Davide Rebuffa for the performance of the pieces attributed to Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello, probably composed in Stuttgart after 1737 for a member of the family of the Dukes of Württemberg, at the service of which he spent much of his existence.

Diogenio Bigaglia, a composer who at present is unknown to most people, was active in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century, so he was a contemporary of the much better known Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, and, above all, Antonio Vivaldi, whose work shows several evident– and more or less explicit – references to Bigaglia’s production. So he turns out to be a composer who is worthy of interest not only for the intrinsic musical worth of his works, but also for the influence his activity may have had on musicians with whom we are more familiar; this is why musicologists have recently started showing an increasing interest in him.

The selection of cantatas presented here is performed by the voice of soprano Tullia Pedersoli that skillfully interprets the musical ‘affetti’ proposed by the simple and elegant style of the composer, who in some points even seems to have provided some cues to Johann Sebastian Bach that, as known, deeply studied Italian and Venetian. All the cantate are about love, and frequently resort to the literary topoi that are typical of this genre.

A precious sound document by the late maestro Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini – also in some Tactus' historic early recordings (see TB460090) – in a live recording on the Giuseppe Serassi 1764 organ of the Cathedral of Guastalla, on 2 October 2011. The event took place as part of the "Musica intorno al fiume" organ festival, set up by the cultural association "Giuseppe Serassi" from Guastalla (RE). For the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy (1861-2011) Tagliavini elaborated a very interesting program aimed at celebrating the anniversary: from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, crossing the main Italian music schools and their influences in Europe, the collection depicts a passionate and emblematic fresco of the evolution of the Italian organ school.

The CDs contained in this box set were conceived and produced as part of the project "Il mandolino a Napoli nel Settecento”, coordinated by the University of Bologna in collaboration with the University of Uppsala and the Neapolitan Mandolin Academy (www.mandolinonapoli700.com). The objective of the project was the recording on period instruments of the 19 compositions for mandolin by Neapolitan composers of the eighteenth century, whose manuscripts are collected in the Gimo collection and preserved in the "Carolina Rediviva" Library of the University of Uppsala. The two CDs include the works by Giovanni Battista Gervasio (CD1), and Emanuele Barbella, Gioacchino Còcchi and an anonymous (CD2). The production aims to offer the listener a new interpretation of this repertoire based on an interpretative concept sensitive to the quality of sound, phrasing and aesthetic and compositional concepts of the time, contributing to a more extensive rediscovery of the Neapolitan and southern Italian instrumental repertoire of the eighteenth century. This CD box was born thanks to the fruitful collaboration between the University of Bologna and the Museum of San Colombano – Tagliavini Collection, that hosted most of the recordings and made available the precious instruments of its collection.

Throughout the 19th century, the chamber song was one of the most common ways of writing, making and experiencing music. It involved a multitude of poets, composers and singers, some of them professionals (theatre composers, quality musicians, opera stars), others amateurs. This repertoire has been studied especially with regards the work of the great opera composers – Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi – or the later output of the specialist Francesco Paolo Tosti, but in reality it is a very widespread phenomenon that gave rise to some worthy compositions, even though to appreciate them one should not forget that the context of their use, the nature of their performers and the very aesthetics of drawing room music called for values different from those of the theatre: spontaneity, ease, immediacy (values that also the “great opera composers” adhered to when writing for the drawing room).

Drawing on unpublished manuscripts owned by the Liszt Institute of Bologna, the soprano Barbara Vignudelli and the pianist Stefano Malferrari offer us a superb performance of this collection which presents an exemplary sample of the variety of styles and formal solutions used by composers completely outside the ranks of famous names, and yet able to compose short pieces that hold some pleasant surprises for the listener.

Born in France with Mozart’s double Concerto kv 299 and explored (albeit with a certain discontinuity) by composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the flute and harp duo was very popular with composers of the twentieth century, all over the world and in every possible style: the choice of the repertoire for this recording, however, privileged compositions inspired by the neoclassical taste, showing how it could be defined in many personal and different ways.

This production includes an anthology of unpublished works for flute and harp; apart from the famous sonata by Nino Rota, all other compositions are world premiere recordings. The consolidated duo formed by Claudio Ortensi and Anna Pasetti is already distinguished for recordings aimed at the rediscovery of music written specifically for their instruments in the Classical style (Luigi Gianella – Trois Duos Concertants op. 2, TC770702, Tactus, 2014) and in the Romantic age (Music for flute and harp of the Italian nineteenth century TC800005, Tactus, 2017).

After the success of the "Missa novem vocum" (Tactus, TC951202, January 2022), with this new production by composer Carlo Alessandro Landini we return to the profane genre with the Sonata no. 7 for piano. Emblematic for the understanding of the artist Landini and his music, the album consists of a single track only of over 56 minutes. In his Piano Sonatas, Landini is clearly in opposition to the present-day trend of a fragmented world, of a schizophrenic speed, of zapping now transformed into scrolling (the by-now daily vertical unrolling of a social network). These Sonatas, three or four decades ago, were described as record-beating compositions because of their duration, which was much longer than average. The Sonata no. 7, composed in 2017-2018, treads in the footsteps of the previous ones with its recherche d’un temps perdu: not a bygone time that is longed for in a nostalgic way, but rather an expanded time that allows us to forget the time of clocks (or, in fact, of smartphones) and to retrieve the vital breathing space that our everyday life denies us. At the piano we have the great Massimiliano Damerini, among the most blazoned performers of nineteenth-century and contemporary music.

This album is dedicated to Tomaso Pegolotti, a character who held the double role of notary public and musician in the land of the Estense dukedom between Modena and Reggio Emilia. In fact, his father Livio initiated him into both the study of music and law, and thanks to his commitment and his talent, Tomaso had a brilliant career in both professions. The collection of the "Trattenimenti armonici da camera [...] opera prima", dedicated to Prince Foresto d'Este in 1698, includes his entire instrumental production, as the planned second work was finally never terminated due to Pegolotti's involvement in some unexpected political clash also connected to one of his judicial publications.

The collection consists of twelve sonatas from which can be deduced that the author possessed considerable technical skills on the violin. The Opera Quinta ensemble led by Fabrizio Longo (former protagonist of other important productions by Tactus: tc.630201, tc.670290 and tc.621602) is a solid reference in the musical practice of early and Baroque music.

Although now Rossini is remembered for his operatic production, his career had begun as a composer of chamber music. In 1804 the 12-year-old Gioachino was invited to spend the summer in the villa of his friend Agostino Triossi in Conventello. This rich landowner, who was an amateur double-bass player, was in the habit of organising concerts and musical gatherings: Rossini composed many instrumental pieces for him. The "Sei sonate a quattro for two violins, cello and double-bass" were composed for one of these occasions.

As Rossini himself related, “They are six horrible sonatas, composed by me during a holiday near Ravenna, in the house of my friend and patron Agostino Triossi, at a more than childish age, when I had not even had a single accompaniment lesson, and the whole thing was composed and copied in three days and performed dreadfully by Triossi, double-bass, Morini (his cousin) first violin, his brother, cello, and the second violin was me, who, to own the truth, was the least dreadful.”

We must not be misled by such a negative opinion. These sonatas, though elementary from a formal point of view, are genuine and quite inspired: the contrast between the brilliant passages and the lyrical/sentimental ones already reveals what a skillful opera composer Rossini was to become.

A repertoire of absolute rarity is presented in this release, given the peculiarity represented by the instrumentation (horn and piano) that in the history of music cannot boast large quantities of original compositions. The program presented here by Nilo Caracristi and Giancarlo Guarino covers various centuries and changing styles: the music, the performers and the listeners are involved in a constant transformation that is proposed, experienced and perceived on several levels.

This musical journey begins with Gustavo Rossari’s Fantasia on motifs by Verdi, passes through the Italian twentieth century with the brilliant Sonata by Giorgio Ferrari, proceeds with Aleksandr Scriabin’s wonderful, romantic Romanza, an early work of his, plunges into the contemporary age with the nostalgia and rhythmic vigor of Fabián Pérez Tedesco’s Fantasia and with the soft swing of Donato Semeraro’s Ballad and Salsa, and ends with the thrilling main theme of the soundtrack of The Godfather 2, by Nino Rota, presented in a further, final metamorphosis that this time directly involves the musicians, surprising the listeners with an unexpected effect.