Bonaventura Rubino's Missa de Morti (Requiem Mass) is presented here within the liturgical and musical context that is peculiar to this friar from Bergamo. The polyphonic sections for voices and basso continuo alternate with the liturgical monodies of the ancient Roman rite, in keeping with the melodic and textual codification of St. Pius V's Missal and the Medicean Gradual. The recording of this Mass was carried out in several points of the church, in order to give the listener the physical sensation of the various spots where the ceremony was taking place and the music was being performed.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The piano work by Franco Margola, brilliant composer and teacher of the second half of the twentieth century, is presented for the first time in an integral edition within this release containing his greatest works and his didactic compositions that Margola continued writing even in his most advanced age. Here Margola's musical writing quality appears in all it's value, testifying the unconditional esteem his music enjoyed by one of the greatest pianists of all time, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, that often used to perform his works in concert. The performance is entrusted to the rare technical and expressive abilities of Alessandro Deljavan, a multi-award-winning top performer of the current international piano scene. Deljavan began studying the piano when he was only two years old, and after receiving a degree from the Conservatory of Milan, Italy, he was selected for the prestigious Lake Como International Piano Association where he studied with William Grant Nabore, Dimitri Bashkirov, Laurent Boullet, and others. His prizes include 5th place at the 2005 Gina Bachauer International Young Artists Competition, and 2nd prize at the 2010 Isang Yun Competition, South Korea.

The sacred and the profane, the human voices and the instruments, tradition and innovation, poetry and dance; all these elements contribute to the construction of the music contained in this ‘bicinium’, where the two ‘voices’ of the composers - Maurizio Guernieri and Pier Paolo Scattolin - face a wide variety of themes and musical forms: from the Mass to the fairy tale with music, along to the more classical forms like the quartet the chorus, to the use of symphonic orchestras or electric guitar. The result is an intense world of colors, lights and sound landscapes coming from a musical language that, despite its novelty, is rooted in the increasingly fertile ground of tradition, showing in this way that music can be written without falling into banality of the many contemporary proposals that have nothing to leave beyond their pure commercial result.

On this release, Tactus continues the rediscovery of the archive of the S. Cristina monastery in Senigallia were are preserved a large amount of manuscripts by composer Giovanni Morandi, friend and collaborator of Rossini, married to the famous opera singer Rosa Morolli (acclaimed interpreter of the works of Rossini, Mozart, Cimarosa and Paisiello) and organ teacher to the nuns of the same convent. This chapter includes the organ transcriptions of operatic songs written by Morandi for the use of its nuns pupils (indisputable evidence of how the opera music could also come within the enclosure!). Morandi re-writes and adapts to the organ, symphonies and arias of the greatest opera composers of the time, Rossini's first and foremost, but also Verdi, Donizetti, Pacini, revealing interesting aspects on the performance practice of theatrical styles in the realization of the cadences or variations in the arias. Federica Iannella, specialist in nineteenth-century repertoire, here plays the Giacomo Bazzani 1856 organ, example of the organ theatrical aesthetics in the Marche region.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Letizia Belmondo - one of the major interpreters of the harp scene and winner of the most important international competitions - is the exceptional interpreter of the fascinating music included on this release, dedicated to the historical revaluation of the great Neapolitan melody, brought on the harp by the masters of the Italian harp school between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is precisely in Naples itself that these composers were active, and in their compositions evoked the wonder and spontaneity of melodies that became famous all over the world. On addition to these pieces, we have transcriptions of some of the most famous arias of the eighteenth-century in a colorful mixture of folk music and operatic and theatrical tradition. Born in Turin in 1981, Letizia Belmondo began to study harp at the age of eight at the Suzuki Talent Center in Turin. She continued her studies at the G Verdi Conservatory in Turin, and later the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon as well as The Juilliard School. In 2001, Belmondo won first prize at the prestigious International Harp Contest in Israel, as well as the Ester Herlitz Prize awarded for the best performance of a contemporary piece. She has gone on to win numerous other competitions and prizes, including the International Harp Competition in Lausanne and special prize for the best performance of the Prelude by Jolivet. She is currently Professor of Harp at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne.

Classical Music