A lot has been written but little has been told about the Neapolitan Ferdinando Carulli, considered the founder of nineteenth-century technique and didactical teaching of the guitar; his figure as composer (he left us an endless number of compositions), represents an essential reference for the study of the guitar. This album, performed by Sandro Volta and Mauro Bonelli, is focused on one of the least considered aspects, yet very important for the formation of a musician: the music for two guitars in its fundamental meaning: on one hand exquisitely concertistic pieces, on the other hand dedicated to pure didactics - real “Lessons” - for which the compositions for two performers are particularly important. The interpretation of these works by Ferdinando Carulli was developed on the basis of the use of two period guitars with catgut strings from the collection of Lorenzo Frignani, in Modena, and on a “historically informed” performance practice. The result is aesthetically quite different from that obtained with modern instruments: its distinctive qualities are a more audible “noise” when the fingers pluck the strings or run over them, a more marked difference in the timbres of the various ranges, and also a particular lightness of sound.

Vincenzo Capirola (1474- after 1548) was one of the most important composers of Italian early 16th century instrumental music. + In the first decades of the century composers begin to write and publish specific instrumental pieces. + Consequently, instrumental music started to emerge from the medieval shadows. + Capirola played a leading role in this flourishing phase of instrumental repertoire. + His writing is strongly original, especially the ricercars, which have stunning compositional breadth.

Marianna Bottini and Alessandro Rolla belong to that group of forgotten protagonists of the early nineteenth century who successfully operated in various compositional fields. Rolla is hired as conductor by the Viceroy of France from 1805 to 1835; his music captures the peculiarities of the historical moment: the heroic, patriotic sentiment of a newborn homeland, the Mitteleuropean harmonic elegance, and the Italian belcanto. On the other side the surprising talent of Marianna Bottini is revealed by her intense compositional activity in the years between 1815 (when she was just 13 years old) and 1823, the year of her wedding; all her compositions have certainly been performed as evidenced by the existence of detached parts and evident traces of use on them. The soloists Remo Pieri (clarinet), Gianni Bicchierini (piano) and Tommaso Valenti (viola), accompanied by the orchestra of the “Luigi Boccherini” Institute of Lucca conducted by Gianpaolo Mazzoli, within this album are performing the concerts for soloist and orchestra by the two composers.

Antonio Bazzini, violinist and composer, was born in Brescia on 11 March 1818 and died in Milan on 10 February. At the age of eight, he began to study the violin under the guidance of Fausto Camesani (or Camisani); at thirteen, he published his first composition; and at seventeen, he had six symphonies for great orchestra performed at the theatre of Brescia. In 1836, when he was eighteen, he was auditioned by Paganini, who encouraged him to embark on a career as a concert performer. From that time onwards, he was constantly successful. He held concerts in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Denmark, England and Belgium. He met many contemporary composers, one of whom was Robert Schumann, who praised him saying: “Since many years no virtuoso has given me such an intimate joy and such pleasant, happy moments as Antonio Bazzini has done. It seems to me that he is too little known, and that, even here, he has not been appreciated as much as he deserves.” The works for string quartet performed by Quartetto Bazzini in this recording are no. 1 without an opus number and no. 3 op. 76. On listening to these two works, we can understand and appreciate Bazzini’s mastery as a composer: the solo parts are skillfully distributed among the string instruments, and we can detect an influence of French and German instrumental music, filtered by his creative genius, which is never predictable or recognisable.

Barbara Strozzi had the good luck to be born in 1619 in Venice, in a world rich in creativity, intellectual ebullience and artistic freedom. She became well-known as a composer and singer, and published eight collections of vocal music (125 chamber cantatas) without the support of the Church or the patronage of an aristocratic family. Her works were included in important anthologies published in Europe and England. She died in Padua, in 1677. She was the adoptive daughter of Giulio Strozzi, and very probably his natural daughter; in order to promote her shows, in 1637 the poet founded the Accademia degli Unisoni. The very limited biographical information we have about Barbara’s private life reveals the personality of a woman endowed with extraordinary talent, beauty, intellect and entrepreneurship. Her Op. 6, published in Venice in 1657, includes cantatas and stanza arias. These compositions show the influence of Claudio Monteverdi, and are characterised by a great expressiveness based on the force of music, which always highlights and magnifies the emotions transmitted by the text. This programme presents some Ariette and is enriched by short pieces for solo harpsichord. The harpsichord introductions to the Ariette come from the seventeenth-century manuscript Chigi Q.IV.27, preserved in the Biblioteca Vaticana in Rome. This manuscript contains a series of anonymous preludes, whose style of composition is reminiscent of that of Barbara Strozzi.

The pieces recorded here have a common characteristic: they are all inspired by lines of poets who were born in Romagna or attracted by this enchanted land. On the one hand Pascoli and Moretti, on the other Panzini, who was practically a citizen of Rimini, and Carducci, who was an enthusiastic visitor in the countryside of Cesena. Romagna is the place where their respective memorial buildings stand, ranging from those in San Mauro Pascoli and Cesenatico to the Casa Rossa in Bellaria and Villa Silvia in Lizzano, above Renato Serra’s Cesena. These four houses actually have been united by a strong project, whose goal was to give rise to a musical competition under the aegis of the four illustrious men of letters. This was the origin of the “Primo Concorso internazionale di composizione lirica da camera su testi di poeti e scrittori di Romagna”, organized by N.O.T.A. Music, a cultural association that is quite zealous and innovative in the sphere of didactic and productive activities. A selection from this competition is included in the program of this album.

Among the motivations of this disc, the most important one is the wish to present the various styles and periods in a clear, simple way, endeavoring to avoid superabundance and the accumulation of crossover deposits that are often heard where it seems that the music of the past cannot be self-sufficient and needs an extra chromatic and rhythmic shove in order to catch the listeners’ attention, inducing them to compare it with the commercial, repetitive entertainment repertoire. In this musical journey between Italy and Spain of the Baroque era, Paolo Rigano on the archlute and baroque guitar and Cinzia Guarino on the harpsichord are interpreting a singular anthology of pieces enriching the playing through the practice of the basso continuo that marked the entire musical period from the Renaissance to the late Baroque.

After the publication of the complete keyboard works within the tc.580600 box set, with this album Tactus begins the world premiere of the Frescobaldi unpublished manuscripts, whose attribution has finally come to an end after years of work by Constance Frei and Etienne Darbellay, the most accredited musicologist in the studies concerning the great composer from Ferrara, and curator of the most important printed edition ever made of his keyboard works. Ivana Valotti, at the Antegnati 1565 organ in the Palatine Basilica of Santa Barbara in Mantua, performs a variegated anthology of toccatas, canzonas, and ricercars. The music is taken from the Chigi codices, a seventeenth-century collection of vocal scores and keyboard manuscripts collected by the Chigi family, which has in its leading exponents Fabio Chigi (alias Pope Alexander vi) and his nephew Flavio (cardinal), donated to the Vatican Apostolic Library by the Italian state in 1924.

The Cappella Musicale of the Basilica di San Francesco is several centuries old; its origin is very ancient and dates back to the first years of the thirteenth century, in direct connection with the particular stimulus given by St. Francis to singing the praise of God, an activity that was encouraged by a renovation of liturgical prayer, within the precepts of the Holy Roman Church. The main purpose of this release is to present a retrospective view of the last two centuries of the Cappella Musicale of the Basilica Papale di San Francesco in Assisi, through the three musicians, friars of the Franciscan Order of the Convent Minorites, who are the best representatives of that period: for the nineteenth century, Father Alessandro Borroni; for the period straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Father Domenico Stella; and for the most recent period, Father Antonio Alemanno. The reason for this proposal is above all the high artistic quality of the works presented, with respect to the fact they are very little known or have been almost completely forgotten. A further peculiarity of this production lies instead in the organic the three Assisi Chapel Masters are writing for, that is the classical chamber music ensemble for voice and piano that finds its own peculiar space next to the large quantity of liturgical music production created by the composers as assigned by the “Basilica del Sacro Convento.”

A plunge among the sunken composers of Italian chamber music and the salvaged ones. The program recorded in this album is a ticket for a journey of a century and a half, that is the distance between the composition of the Sonata “con accompagnamento” by Muzio Clementi (1792) and its transformation into the Trio ortodosso by Alfredo Casella (1936). An intermediate stop is represented by the Trio op. 59 by Giuseppe Martucci (1882). The route of this journey retraces a history that is not unimportant or unsurprising: it summarises the significance and vicissitudes of the chamber music produced by Italian composers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. In many texts of music history this topic is relegated in a note, or at most is dealt with in a paragraph, not even a chapter: an upgraded echo of the Fascist nationalism and dislike for Puccini that, for ideological reasons rather than for a historical or critical conviction, made themselves useful in raising the issue in the twentieth century. This recording, which presents a performance for piano, violin and cello, is a tiny artistic compensation, and an aesthetic and formal clarification. It leads us to consider and understand the role that Italian composers played also in the specific area of non-theatrical music.

This unexpected finding, found in an old trunk in an attic in Trento, makes it possible for us now to reconstruct a brilliant passage in the musical history of that city. The trunk contained some organ scores that had been written by Davide Urmacher (organist at the nearby church of San Pietro) and played by him, first on the fifteenth century organ, then on the organ made in 1862 by Giovanni Battista De Lorenzi, from Vicenza. Together with other scores countersigned by members of the Dall’Armi family, owners of a shop near the Ginnasio in Via San Pietro, this treasure chest has yielded some invaluable organ scores that were in use in the city between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. This entire collection, together with others (both public and private) existing in Trentino, provides a complex, varied and wide-ranging picture of the organ music that was being played in that period over the entire territory, with a lively circulation of material. The organist Simone Vebber makes use of a historic nineteenth-century organ in the performance of the compositions in the classic theatrical styles of the time.

Carlo Filago, though he was a multifaceted musician, was mainly a talented organist. In 1623 he won the competition for the assignment as first organist at S. Marco in Venice outperforming valid competitors: responsible for S. Marco’s Cappella was at that time no less than Claudio Monteverdi. Contemporary documents confirm his ability and praise his “florid style” and his “inimitable virtuosity”. The collection of the Sacri Concerti a voce sola, published in Venice in 1642, is a typical example of the Venetian motet, a musical form that has given us countless collections containing precious musical gems (such as La Ghirlanda Sacra, [tc.620080] and I Sacri Musicali Affetti by Barbara Strozzi [tc.611990]). The author’s intent to adhere to the ancient style of the Monteverdi "prima prattica" is well done by the Ensemble Les Nations, led by Maria Luisa Baldassari and including the leading voice of Arianna Lanci, Elena Bianchi's dulciana, and the participation by alto Marcella Ventura, by tenor Giovanni Cantarini, and by Pedro Alcacer on the theorbo.

In this new album by violinist and composer Diego Conti, the minimalist ensemble (violin and percussion) becomes a mean and a pretext to search new effects in the simplest and most primordial forms of sound. The extreme contrast between the frequencies, the timbres and the different “attacks” of the sounds of the instruments create atmospheres with which the composer gives life to imaginary planets, visited in his frequent science fiction readings, his great passion. Performed on percussion by Laura Mancini and Gianni Maestrucci, and on the violin by Laura Marzadori, star of the Italian music scene, first violin of the Teatro alla Scala orchestra in Milan, and already on Tactus’ albums dedicated to Ermanno Wolf Ferrari (TC872303) and Leone Sinigaglia (TC861901).

Antonio Bazzini, violinist and composer, was born in Brescia on March 11, 1818. At the age of eight, he began to study the violin under the guidance of Fausto Camesani (or Camisani); at thirteen, he published his first composition; and at seventeen, he had six symphonies for great orchestra performed at the theatre of Brescia. In 1836, when he was eighteen, he was auditioned by Paganini, who encouraged him to embark on a career as a concert performer. From that time onwards, he was constantly successful. He held concerts in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Denmark, England and Belgium. He met many contemporary composers, one of whom was Robert Schumann, who praised him saying: “Since many years no virtuoso has given me such an intimate joy and such pleasant, happy moments as Antonio Bazzini has done. It seems to me that he is too little known, and that, even here, he has not been appreciated as much as he deserves.” With this album the Quartetto Bazzini completes the recording of Bazzini’s string quartets (originally printed in the nineteenth century) started in 2018 with the previous album (TC810202). The new album is including quartets n. 2, no. 4 and n. 5, shorter than the monumental n. 1 and n. 3 of the previous release, testify - as the composer Arrigo Boito reminds us - a great intelligence by years of performances and studying of the great German quartets, an experience that allowed him to remain, unlike many contemporaries, independent of the dominant melodramatic context.

Giovanni Antonio Piani was a son of the Bolognese musician Pietro Giacomo Piani, who played the trumpet in the Neapolitan court. He was born in 1678 in Naples, where he studied the violin at the Conservatory under the guidance of Giovan Carlo Cailò and Nicola Vinciprova. He became a skillful violinist and had a brilliant career, which led him first to Paris, then, from 1721 to at least 1757, to the imperial court of Vienna, where he was the best-paid performer with orchestra conducting functions from 1741 onwards. The only musical work by Piani that is known to us and was published in Paris in 1712 is the collection entitled in Italian “Sonate / a Violino solo e Violoncello col Cimbalo […] Opera Prima”. Poised between the Italian and French styles, the Piani sonatas are accompanied by various graphic marks on the score that the composer is using for suggesting dynamic expressions or articulations as explained within the "Avvertimenti" (Warnings) addressed to the performer, and to which the Ensemble Labirinto Armonico, led by Pierluigi Mencattini, pays the correct attention for obtaining an interpretation that fully respects the intentions of the author.