This singular discographic project unites the sacred pianistic work by Franz Liszt to those by Bonifacio Maria Krug, both composers and abbots. If Franz Liszt is already known to the public, Krug (abbot in the abbey of Montecassino in 1864) is an important discovery proposed by the young and talented pianist Silvia Vaglica assisted by the Benedictine father Fabrizio Messina Cicchetti. Both Liszt and Krug joined with fervor the directions that will later be outlined by the Cecilian movement regarding the issues related to music in the liturgy, and the music proposed in this recording testifies their commitment to bringing the sacred themes out of their customary borders, contrarily to what happened in the middle of the nineteenth century in Italy, when the theatrical style also spread in liturgical compositions.

What paths did the composition of sacred music take at the beginning of this millennium? What is its relationship with liturgy? What prospects does it have? On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Domenico Bartolucci (1917-2013), historic conductor of the choir of the Sistine Chapel and prolific composer, the Second National Conference of Composers of Sacred Music, promoted by the Associazione Italiana Santa Cecilia, was held in Rome from 1 to 3 September 2017. The conclusive Mass that was celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica, in the Cappella del Coro, offered the chance to observe how today’s composers deal with the holy texts, ideally proceeding along the paths that since the first centuries of the Christian era, with time, branched out from the papal seat to the ends of the earth. Contrary to what happens at present in a widespread practice, the texts that are set to music in this celebration are not juxtaposed to the rite but spring from it, and the lexicon used by the composers – albeit with differences between the individual composers – aims to express the deep meaning of the celebration without misleading the listeners or shocking them with avant-garde languages and shifting their attention to matters that are foreign to the liturgical prayer.

The present release synthesizes some stages characterizing the composition path of Pier Paolo Scattolin: from a cappella vocality to instrumentalism with stylistic dynamics sometimes distant but all having in common the research on sound, from the linguistic phoneme to the eclectic and sometimes experimental use of instrumental emission. The path winds through almost forty years of continuous investigation and dissection of both choral and instrumental sound, the latter of a chamber/soloistic character and in some cases concerted and intersected with the voice. In the a cappella choral repertoire a varied anthology collects poetic and literary texts by Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alda Merini, Umberto Saba, Emily Dickinson, Alessandro Striggio, Agnolo Poliziano, Alceo, Saffo, Ipponatte, Enzo Iacchetti, Agnese Troilo and the composer himself. Some choral pieces are concerted with the Ensemble of ancient instruments Circe from Bologna, whose presence stems from the search for a sound language proceeding towards the stripping and essentiality of a music and a sound coherent with the setting of the poetic texts in order to transfer their instrumental characteristics to contemporary musical expression. In some pieces the solo voices are added as an almost instrumental colour, a timbre enrichment of the sonorities of the organ, the recorders, and the trumpets.

In the month of what would have been his ninetieth birthday, this record comes as a tribute to Sylvano Bussotti. One of the most singular and emblematic composers on the international contemporary classical scene, Bussotti passed away in September 2021. This music comes to us thanks to Jonathan Faralli on percussion and Roberto Fabbriciani on flute, an equally emblematic performer and constant point of reference in the musical production of our century, as well as a great friend and close collaborator of Bussotti himself. A must-have for lovers of the genre as well as the curious newcomer, the album offers masterful work by the two performers as they stage Bussotti's famously theatrical scores, full of dramaturgy, poetry and scenography for both eyes and ears.

The production of the award-winning composer Carlo Alessandro Landini is enriched with this publication of a sacred page - not common for the maestro - of rare difficulty. Difficulty due not only to the essence of a text like that of a mass, so full of substance and meaning that it makes your wrists tremble at the idea of translating them into music, but also to the inevitable confrontation with the greatest geniuses in history who, from the Middle Ages to the present days, have tried their hand at this genre. Landini uses for his work an acappella vocal group (the Ensemble Fleur-de-Lys, directed by maestro Giorgio Ubaldi), in a sort of return to the purest essence of musical expression, the ancestral and at the same time always modern that comes from the human voice alone. A look therefore to the past great polyphonic traditions that finds its reason in a modernity that has now overcome the 'sterility' of many avant-gardes that, through pure research, however, have not reached the completing of the art form.

This recording – culmination of a research work that started out in 2020 – follows the previously released album including the third book of madrigals by the same author (Tactus, TC531601, 2021), which was the result of the collaboration between conductor Elia Orlando, ensemble Tuscae Voces and the Tactus record label. It is safe to say that the outcome confirms how the musical landscape in the Renaissance Prato deserves way more attention than it has drawn so far, and that Biagio Pesciolini – besides being closely connected to the Florentine court – was an author whose vision went beyond the city walls of Prato. Although praised by peers Ludovico Zacconi and Antonio Brunelli for his mastery of those techniques that belong to Flemish-origin ars musica, he skilfully took on both “orthogonal” writing for double choir and winding compositions for five and six voices, which proves that Biagio Pesciolini was indeed open and receptive to the different tendencies of Italy’s most important musical centres.

The fame of Father Giambattista Martini is largely due to his activity as a historiographer, theoretician and teacher of music unceasingly carried out by him at the Bolognese convent of S. Francesco: his monumental Storia della musica, the first history of music ever written in Italian and published in Italy, was hailed by the most distinguished personalities of that period, who unanimously praised his deep erudition. A great number of young composers and musicographers from all over Europe, wishing to learn the secrets of this art, stopped in Bologna to receive a training or perfect their knowledge under his guidance. A less celebrated activity by Martini was that as composer that he carried out continuously as maestro di cappella in the Basilica next to the Bolognese convent from 1725 to the time of his death. The pieces presented in this CD relate a little-known episode in Martini’s life, an episode that shows how highly he was appreciated also as a composer. Alessandro Quarta, leading the Concerto Romano and the vocal ensemble Ecclesia Nova, is the protagonist of this precious world premiere recording, a live production by Tactus of the concert held in Bologna at the Basilica of San Francesco the 21st of April 2023.

The organist Andrea Toschi - already protagonist of several productions regarding rare music dedicated to the organ and harmonium, both as soloist and in chamber music ensembles (see Tactus tc810001, tc850004, tc870002 and tc890090) - is the common denominator of this collection of contemporary pieces for solo organ or for organ and instrument (trumpet, flute and cello alternate in duo with the organ). Composers in this cd include Sergio D’Aurizio, director of the Istituto Verdi of Ravenna and organist in Bologna, and Giordano Noferini, who was director of the Conservatorio of Bologna: they represent the musicians who were born in the first half of the twentieth century and were firmly connected to the late-nineteenth century tradition, which they reassessed paying attention to the harmonic aspect. The cd proceeds with Giorgio Pressato and Roberto Becheri: Toschi presents several pieces of theirs, in which Gregorian chant, the counterpoint devices, the relationship with the trumpet (as in Pressato’s In excelsis gloria), the relationship between diatonicism and chromaticism (as in In mei memoriam facietis by Becheri, who also uses the cello in Cantantibus chordis) are distinctive features that need to be carefully emphasised and smoothly blended: this is precisely what Toschi does in his interpretation. The most recent composers are Marc Giacone, Claudio Scannavini, Andrea Padova, and Daniele Venturi: in their music we can perceive an opening to stylistic influences other than the traditional ones: for instance African music in Giacone’s melodies, Scannavini’s use of perceptive deceit, the modern techniques adopted by Padova, and Venturi’s use of complexity as an element of composition.

The singular record production “Ex tempore” is proposed to us by the instrumental ensemble “The Italian Consort”, with the collaboration of Andrea Inghisciano, an exceptional guest and international star of the Renaissance cornetto.
The ancestral sounds of the consort of dulciane, accompanied by the lute of Gian Giacomo Pinardi and the organ of Cinzia Guarino, guide us to listen to a repertoire of both early music - represented by composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - and contemporary, thanks to the compositional contribution of Marco Betta and Giovanni Sollima. The particular timbres of the ancient instruments are the expressive key to intricate labyrinths of contrapuntal alchemies, intense relationships with sacred or poetic texts and implied invitations to dance, in a continuous search for imitation of the human voice that in the Renaissance was considered as the absolute reference for any musical instrument.

This collection of arias from the operas Il Tigrane, Poro, La Sofonisba, L’Ippolito is a testimony of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera activity from the year 1743 to 1745. At the age of 30, yet already successful composer, Gluck wrote his operas for the most important events in the cities of Crema, Turin and Milan, almost without a break. He seems to be at the peak of his career, yet he has not created those great compositions such as Orpheus and Euridice, Paride ed Elena, Alceste, that would have linked his name to the reform of opera theorised together with Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and which made him one of the immortal names in the music history. The autographs of these arias no longer exist, nor the scores of the entire operas. Some pieces, sometimes with only basso continuo accompaniment, are all that remain of the enormous fortune that those performances had at the time. To be as close as possible to the original performance, arias with existing orchestral part have been chosen, except for the aria""Se viver non poss’io"" from the opera Poro which was orchestrated from the basso continuo and some indication of the first violin motif, as complete scores of the opera Poro no longer exist. The curator of the work is Elena De Simone herself, a mezzo-soprano that – accompanied by Il Mosaico ensemble – already distinguished herself with the rediscovery of the works by Hasse and Maria Teresa Agnesi (Tactus' TC690801, TC720101 and TC720102).

Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 – Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17.
Nicola Bignami and Lucija Majstorovic brilliantly face the arduous task of performing the two monumental and demanding sonatas for violin and piano that the composer wrote at twenty-four (first sonata) and at thirty-two (second sonata), in which the equal and dialogical relationship between the two instruments combines with a wealth of invention with respect for the great tradition.

The Italian 19th Century is characterized by an unparalleled opera bulimia, the theaters tirelessly program stagings to be submitted to the perennial abstinents of “belcanto” and the music publishing industry that revolves around the phenomenon flourishes and gears up to not disappoint the fleets of music lovers. This inexhaustible desire is counterbalanced by the other “case” represented by the nascent idolatry for instrument virtuosos who build around themselves a legendary aura - very closed to the configuration of the romantic hero with a fascinating and mysterious biography - and an adequate literature to inflame the delirious audiences. The relapse of similar “obsessions” has an extraordinary confirmation in the salon and academic consumption of pages intended to “evoke” the emotions felt in crowded theater halls, a secular celebration is consumed between more or less prestigious salons aimed at the beloved entertainment between the promotion of young talents, noble amateurs, damsels to marry, prestigious guests. The work of Ferdinando Sebastiani, one of the most accredited clarinetist of the nineteenth century and founder of a recognized “school” which enjoyed great prestige in the national and international context, fits into this so articulated landscape. Aldo Botta on the clarinet and Giuseppe Galiano on the piano try their hand at this fascinating challenge in the name of a funambolic virtuosity and a marked theatrical expressiveness.