Uncertain and mysterious remain the origin and the musical education of Giuseppe Demachi, who after he was established was a composer rather well known in Europe for having published many works in Geneva, Lione, Paris and London. The works published by Demachi known so far number 17, four of which are violin concertos, but others appeared without indication of the opus number, and still others have been found that are hand-written, among which are two program symphonies entitled “Le Campane di Roma” and “Il corso del giorno alla Campagna”. The compositional skill that led him to fame was not second to that of performer: the intense concert activity forced him through the courts of all Europe, where he was highly requested and appreciated. On this release, the ensemble Trigono Armonico led by Maurizio Cadossi performs a vast anthology of his chamber music production on period instruments in full respect of the philological executive practice.

Two talented musicians - Daniela Cammarano and Alessandro Deljavan - are the protagonists of Diego Conti's music for violin and piano, on a world premiere album only a few months after the edition of the works for cello and strings (TC950302). Also in this case the inspiration for his works are multifaceted and eclectic; they range from science fiction to pop 'contaminations' passing through classic forms and personal moments. It should also be noted how Diego Conti - also a great virtuoso of the violin (see Pietro Antonio Locatelli, L’arte del violino op. III, TC691280) - manages to maintain a great balance in writing for the two instruments, not relegating the piano to the role of mere accompanist, but rather making it a protagonist like the violin itself.

The soprano Daniela Mazzucato and the pianist Elia Macrì are the interpreters of the chamber lyrics and piano preludes of two composers who both lived in Trieste in the twentieth century, Vito Levi and Raffaello de Banfield. Coming from different social backgrounds but closely connected in their existence: esteemed musician, essayist and music critic, Levi will introduce the student de Banfield - of noble lineage and son of a legendary Austro-Hungarian military aviation pilot - to the study of music, thanks to which he came in contact with some eminent exponents of the world cultural heritage of the twentieth century, such as Maria Callas, Herbert von Karajan, Igor Strawinsky, Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, just to name a few. Persecuted by the racial laws [“Musica Degenerata” Tactus TC900005] Levi had to flee and hide until the end of the war, returning to occupy those teaching chairs that the regime had stolen from him in Trieste, where in the 70s de Banfield would also return, to direct the city's Opera Theatre and the prestigious Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.

Within this album Fernando Caida Greco is presenting an excursus into the world of contemporary music dedicated to the solo cello, supported by a group of young composers who face the challenge of collecting a legacy originating back in the late seventeenth century, when the works of the main virtuosos dedicated to this instrument made their way into the European musical panorama for the first time (see for example Domenico Gabrielli, cornerstone of the great Bolognese school). Caida Greco plays a perfectly preserved nineteenth-century cello with a gut string setting that gives the instrument an expressiveness not achievable with modern steel strings.

After the previous publication of Ars Modi (Tactus code tc.970202), this double cd retraces three previous creative phases of the young composer Edoardo Bruni: romantic, surrealist, and heroic, on which is based the musical journey leading the author to his expressive maturity. Here we have a variety of different chamber compositions interpreted by numerous musicians who have alternated in the performances. The writing is in the name of a musical manifesto not looking for the “new” writing or expression at any costs, yet trying to find new formulas within a language of the past that belongs to our culture and that, for this reason, doesn’t necessarily need to be betrayed or reviled. The “beauty” - ultimately - has its own precise identity that does not always match with the “new”, as demonstrated by many artistic currents of the twentieth century that, in the desperate search for novelty, have perhaps lost sight of the ultimate goal of art, whose quintessence actually lies in the concept of beauty.

The Marco Enrico Bossi organ music Opera Omnia here continues with its fourteenth volume. This is still including transcriptions from various Italian authors of the Classical period like Azzolino della Ciaja, Baldassarre Galuppi and Padre Martini, and from composers from across the Alps like Gluck, Haydn, Liszt, and even Chopin and Schubert (the famous Funeral March, and two “Moments Musicaux” D 780). The amazing voice of the Carlo Vegezzi Bossi 1889 organ of the Lucera (Foggia) cathedral supplies to Andrea Macinanti a valuable media for performing the rendering of these amazing works. Andrea Macinanti studied at the conservatories of Bologna and Parma and then at the Klemens Schnorr in Munich. He is a member of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna and since 1988 has been the Artistic Director of the international concert review “Ancient organs, a heritage to listen to.”

Giovanni Bononcini was born in Modena on 18 July 1670, the eldest and best-known son of the composer, violinist and theoretician Giovanni Maria (1642-1678), one of the main exponents of the musical school of Modena in the second half of the seventeenth century. His talent was extremely precocious: in 1685 he published Trattenimenti da camera op. 1, Concerti da camera op. 2 and Sinfonie op. 3. Giovanni Bononcini is known above all for his dramatic and vocal chamber music, whose simple, refined intensity of expression was acknowledged by his contemporaries. The cantatas are formed of the prescribed succession of arias (or duets) and recitativos, and show Bononcini’s outstanding expressive skill and his ability in finely crafting the close relationship between words and music that was required by this genre of chamber music because of the need to “further the feeling of that divine poetry by means of the expression of the harmonious melodies” (as he wrote in a letter to Benedetto Marcello from London on 6 April 1725). This ability of his made it possible for him, through his perfect knowledge of counterpoint, to tastefully adjust “the exact observation of the different moods produced in the soul by the different modulations of the sound, so as to be able to adapt them suitably to the needs of the words”. Within this world premiere recording the Aurata Fonte ensemble is performing the manuscripts of a composer whose talent was recognized and affirmed by a great career throughout Europe.

After the first Guitar Works (Tactus TC 960203) album, the production dedicated to the guitar by composer Raffaele Bellafronte continues on this new release by exploring new paths, from the phonic point of view combining the six strings to classical and less usual instruments, and through the writing where the author refers to both classical and popular forms. In this world premiere recording, Davide Di Ienno's guitar plays the role of soloist in two tracks, then confronting himself in chamber dialogues with the bandoneon, violin, marimba and mandolin in a series of compositions that actively contribute to this challenge that throughout the twentieth century left us a lot of precious music.

Orazio Benevoli was one of the most important Roman Baroque composers. Born in Rome in 1605, as a twelve-year-old he joined the choirboys of the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, where he remained until 1623. The following year, he assumed the post of maestro di cappella at Santa Maria in Trastevere, then at Santo Spirito in Saxia and later on at San Luigi dei Francesi. In 1644 he moved to Vienna to serve at the court of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Hapsburg. Upon his return to Rome, he briefly served as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore before becoming the choirmaster of the Cappella Giulia at the Vatican on November 7, 1646, where he remained for over 25 years until his death on June 17, 1672. Vincenzo di Betta leads the Cappella Musicale di Santa Maria in Campitelli to the rediscovery of his "Missa In angustia Pestilenti�" (in the distress of the plague), composed and performed in 1656 in the Basilica of San Pietro behind closed doors, given the severity of the contagion of the plague spread in Rome in the same year, which induced Pope Alessandro VII to issue provisions that would minimize the moments of aggregation in the city, such as solemn celebrations. The work was probably commissioned by the Capitolo of the Basilica for an important occasion, which invoked the divine mercy so that the contagion would cease.

Girolamo Barbieri was born in Piacenza on 2nd October 1808. He began his musical career at a very young age and quickly became a skilled pianist and organist. In 1827 Giuseppe Nicolini, a talented organist and harpsichordist who worked in the ducal theatres of Piacenza, recommended sending him to study at the Conservatory in Milan. The Marquis Bernardino Mandelli, for whom Barbieri’s father worked as a butler, offered to pay all the expenses but, in that same year, both Girolamo’s patron and father died. Because of this, Barbieri began teaching himself music by using all the works he could borrow, and rapidly mastered the art of composition and instrumentation, thus becoming a sought-after conductor and skilled composer. Blessed with fluent melodic ease, he wrote countless compositions for solos, choirs, organ, piano and other instruments; his musical genre impeccably reflected the dramatic-operatic taste of the time. The pieces included in this release are among the most representative of his extensive organ production and find fertile ground in the typical "band/orchestral" sonority of the 19th-century Lombard tradition. On 24th July 1843, as recorded in archival evidence, he was called to inaugurate the newly built Angelo Amati great pipe organ in Pizzighettone (Cremona), which is the same organ which was used in this recording.

The rationale of the programme presented by the Labirinto Armonico Ensemble is of a purely geographic nature: it offers a selection of works by three composers who were active in very different contexts between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth, but were united by the fact that they were all three natives of Abruzzi. Michele Mascitti, prominent violinist and composer, played a fundamental role in spreading the Italian style in France, making his fortune in Paris where he carried out his musical career; from there his fame extended to England and the Netherlands. Fedele Fenaroli, on the other hand, was a very important teacher and appreciated by Giuseppe Verdi for his treaty on the “Partimenti.” Giacomo Fornaci is the oldest of the three composers, of which only the collection of arias from included in this album have survived.

The Cappella Musicale di San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna constitutes a vocal and instrumental group dedicated to the enhancement of the unpublished heritage of hidden treasures in the still unexplored musical archives. After the sacred works by Ippolito Ghezzi, Pirro Capacelli Albergati, and of the “Italian Seicento in Spanish style,” the team directed by Roberto Cascio tackles the genre of the eighteenth-century comic intermezzo, which had great fortune in its time among the composers of the theatrical genre, to then come up to the present day in the wake of the immortal Serva Padrona by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. The two interludes proposed here are the “Palandrana and Zamberlucco” by Alessandro Scarlatti, the progenitor of that Eighteen century Neapolitan school in which Pergolesi will also grow, and the “Selvaggia and Dameta” by anonymous composer. Both works are centered on comic amorous quarrels performed by two characters brought to the stage by the vocal parts of a contralto and a bass.

Francesco Balilla Pratella, one of the most important and eclectic figures of the early-twentieth- century cultural scene in Italy, molded his life to the constant pursuit of spiritual ascension and the quest for the essence of humanity. For him, these conditions were indispensable for achieving the “humanized re-creation of the world”, the primary, essential goal of an artist-creator: “Creation, in an absolute sense, is not a human faculty; we cannot add or remove anything in the universe. But we can humanly re-create the universe, that is, translate it and re-express it with images and values that are essentially human. This is what art is, and this is what life is: a human re-creation of the world in its terms and values, and only for man: a humanization of the world.” So he re-created the world, his world, untiringly dividing himself between musical composition, teaching, the passionate study of folk traditions, and the writing of hundreds and hundreds of theoretic, critical, musical-aesthetic and philosophic texts. The Pratella Ensemble is the interpreter of this production that collects a varied anthology of the composer's chamber production: lieder, instrumental and choral pages that reflect the work and life of a highly original author, protagonist of a historical and cultural moment - that of the futurism - of great experimentation and artistic travail.

The musical production of Francesco Saverio Geminiani is totally focused on instrumental music, and includes two collections of violin sonatas, one of cello sonatas, three of concerti grossi, two of Pièces de Clavecin, and a series of transcriptions and revisions of works by other important Italian composers such as Arcangelo Corelli and Francesco Mancini. Geminiani was very active as a treatise writer: he published no less than six works, among which the one that stands out is The art of playing on the violin, published in 1751 and still regarded as the most important violin treatise of that period, together with that of Leopold Mozart from 1756. The treatise became quite famous at once, and was much used by the composer’s contemporaries; several versions of it were published up to 1790, with English and French editions, reaching the New World. The composer’s only digression from his customary work consisted of La Forêt enchantée, a theatrical pantomime meant to be performed by mimes and dancers on expressly-composed music; it had been inspired by Canti xiii and xviii of Gerusalemme liberata, by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). The version drawn up by Claudio Valenti – who devised the dramatic part together with the actor Piero Nannini – seeks out and re-creates the prosodic relationship between the text and the music that constitutes the core of the composer’s inspiration in his reading of Tasso’s text. For this reason, the work is presented not only in its version for string instruments alone, with the addition of a single flute, but has also been stripped of its orchestral repetitions (all of them), so as to outline an instrumental structure that is transparent, but able to catch and amplify the expressive peculiarities of the score in relation to the text, achieving a novel sort of representative madrigal.

With this double album, the world premiere recording of Marco Enrico Bossi's complete organ works, undertaken by Andrea Macinanti over 10 years ago, finally comes to an end. Same as the whole complete opera, this dutiful tribute to one of the great and forgotten composers of Italian twentieth century organ music ends on a series of historical instruments that fully document the musical aesthetics of the great organist. The repertoire includes transcriptions of famous pieces by great authors of the nineteenth-century, vocal and instrumental pieces with the original accompaniment of the organ, and some interesting unfinished organ fragments completed for the occasion by Maestro Paolo Geminani.