The Baroque Ensemble “Carlo Antonio Marino,” directed by Natale Arnoldi, already protagonist of important Classical and late Baroque productions, within this album is faced with the concerts from the seventh opera by Pietro Antonio Locatelli, well known composer and violinist from Bergamo. When it appeared, this collection was not particularly successful; probably the mixture of different musical styles in the Concertos was not appreciated by the public, which by then was moving towards the new sensitivity of the galant style. Op. 7, in any case, is an excellent and occasionally brilliant work of Locatelli’s: a musician who, in spite of the fact that in 1741 he had already attained fame and glory, did not hesitate to run the risk of attempting to renew the waning Italian Concerto, by experimenting with approaches that might accommodate the new trends, without however denying his own origins.

Anonima Frottolisti Ensemble, a group specializing in Early and medieval music, confronts a little performed yet interesting repertoire: the “contrafacta”, compositions in which the lyrics and the melodies are a blend of the sacred and profane. Starting from the 12th c., these two seemingly opposed worlds diverged in the custom of secular text usage on sacred melodies. Later, the trend is the opposite: popular melodies in vogue at the time are filled with liturgical and spiritual texts, thus becoming an effective means of leading people to faith and knowledge of the scriptures.

Classical Music

Rocco Filippini and Andrea Bacchetti offer a compelling interpretation of rare works from the historical Italian Novecento by Guido Alberto Fano and Silvio Omizzolo. This chamber music gives listeners a perfect glimpse of a moment in history that still remains little known while revealing unsuspected musical gems.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The present release is a world premiere recording of the complete edition of the Sacri Musicali Affetti by Barbara Strozzi, a figure of great importance among the various women musicians of the seventeenth century. Her works went on printed editions for her to be recognized and appreciated as a composer, and not just as an instrumentalist or singer. She was on the Venetian intellectual scene thanks to her connection with the poet and playwright Giulio Strozzi (of whom Barbara is most likely an illegitimate daughter), a fundamental figure in the institution of the Venetian musical theater, and soon appreciated by musicians and writers of cultural circles from Venice. The Aurata Fonte ensemble, specializing in the Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, accompanies the sopranos Anna Simboli and Miho Kamiya with period instruments in the performance of this collection of sacred motets for solo voice where the composer's mastery and refinement is revealed by alternating theatrical and dramatic effects in the name of a marked vocal virtuosity. To be noted at one point the explicit mentioning of the great Claudio Monteverdi, placing by right her work in his musical wake.

With this seventh 2-album volume, Francesco Tasini terminates the recording of the Alessandro Scarlatti's opera omnia for keyboard, that is completed in parallel with the printed edition also by Tasini. The fifteen fugues contained in the first album are performed at the historic 1836 Carlo Serassi organ of the Santa Maria di Campagna basilica in Piacenza, constitute a rich handbook of models for teaching contrappunto techniques developed by Tasini according to the practice of the time. The second album instead contains some pieces, again for organ, and three toccatas for harpsichord in the typical Scarlattian articulation in several movements (the instrument used is an original eighteenth-century by an anonymous artist from Ferrara complete with a pedalboard).

Classical Music

Roberto Noferini performs the brilliant and alluring 24 Caprices of Paganini on an instrument and bow of Paganini's time.

"The electricity I feel when I'm dealing with the magic harmony" Paganini wrote on 15, January 1832 in a letter to his friend Luigi Guglielmo-Germi. There could be no better definition of Paganini's musical temperament. After hearing Paganini play in a concert, Franz Schubert wrote: "I have heard the voice of an angel." And Franz Liszt's comment was: "How much passion, how much suffering in those four strings." How can we imagine Paganini's art today, at such a distance in time, unless we refer to the impressions of his contemporaries, of the people who had the chance to see him, listen to him and be thrilled by his music? The search for a performance that endeavors to be as near as possible to the magic of a live concert of this great Genoese musician can only start from here. In order to attempt this feat of moving musically back two centuries, it is necessary to aquire to the wood, horsehair strings and bow technique within painstaking attention to the directions left by Paganini in his original scores (this was in fact the advice of violinist Artur Grumiaux.) To all this we add the talent of a present-day virtuoso who is less subject to the harsh law of time and can find another way of bringing back to our time the masterpieces of the past. - Tactus

Established in 1986 by Serafino Rossi, Tactus is devoted to the discovery and preservation of the enormous and still unexplored Italian classical music repertoire, from Gregorian chants to Contemporary Classics.

The musical content of this album presents a cross-section of the typical aesthetic features and diversified representative expressions that were most appreciated by the public during the late Renaissance and early Baroque. The style of In Tabernae Musica's performance stems chiefly from the study of the iconographic sources, from which there emerges an artistic production that is targeted not exclusively at the educated class, but also, at the people.

The Codex of Guardiagrele includes several compositions by artists (from Abruzzo and other regions) that worked in Guardiagrele at the Santa Maria Maggiore church. These compositions expose the then-richness of polyphonic music in this region. The Codex includes several early 15th c. manuscripts of liturgic missals conserved until 1979 in Guardiagrele. Directing the De Bon Parole ensemble in this world premiere recording is Marco Giacintucci, who also realized the reconstructions.

Throughout his lifetime, Antonio Vivaldi – a composer of many lyric operas – penned an enormous corpus of works encompassing countless concertos, sonatas, and sacred music. In his concertos and chamber sonatas, Vivaldi reveals his wonderful melodic talent with both deep and elegant allure. The concertos and the sonata of Antonio Vivaldi offered here are seldom performed and recorded. Recorder virtuoso Maria Giovanna Fiorentino leads I Fiori Musicali. “(IFM is) of Europe’s leading baroque ensembles.” (Journées Baroques sur Vienne)

The collection of madrigals "I Diporti della villa in ogni stagione” (The Pastimes of the villa in each season), consists of poems that are chained like episodes of a story marked by the seasons, like details of a larger fresco praising the pleasures of life in the countryside in the alternation of the different moments of the year and illustrating, in a succession of lively images, the occupations and amusements to which those who live far from the urban glamour dedicate themselves in the various months. Fields, rivers, flowers, trees, a varied fauna, shepherds, farmers, wine, fruits, fishing, hunting, bathing, dancing of the nymphs appearing, as it were before the eyes of the listeners: a colorful world full of that idyllic beauty longed for by intellectuals, in which echoes of the Arcadian world are felt, as already exalted in the Trionfo di Dori [Tactus, TC590003] and in many other madrigal productions of the time. Tony Corradini leads the Àrsi & Tèsi Vocal Ensemble in the performance of the madrigals dedicated to the seasons, set to music by some of the greatest composers of the Renaissance era.

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.

The grandeur of the Italian Renaissance polyphonic school does not need an introduction, but this release forcuses on the work of a very little known and performed composer from Bologna: Camillo Cortellini. The complete collection of his masses gives listeners a correct understanding of the historical reassessment of the Bologna music school (as compared to the celevrated Roman or Venetian schools). The "Messa Bolognese" by Cortellini will in fact, be an important link between the late Renaissance and the Baroque. The edition of this album was made possible thanks to the participation of Bolognese choirs and other highly qualified Italian choirs that completed this huge work with great variety of organic sound.

The key to this album presented by Stark Quartet is the exploration of the XIXth and XXth century clarinet repertoire. Here the four musicians juggle between virtuosity and melodic inspirations performed in various different settings. The varied overview of composers presented here is both surprising, for the unexpected presence of an author like Joseph Gherardeschi known for his nineteenth-century style organ composition, and relevant for the importance of others like Ernesto Cavallini (called "the Paganini of clarinet"), yet, reaching contemporaries like Valentino Bucchi, with its important concert for solo clarinet, and Henghel Gualdi, pioneer of jazz clarinet in Italy.

Although the output of Gregorio Allegri was not large, it covered almost every musical genre of the time, from strict polyphony to monody, instrumental music and the cantata. He is now remembered principally as the composer of the nine-voice Miserere, written around 1638 for the Holy Week celebrations and made famous in the nineteenth century version which requires a high C in the coro favorito. Five years of bibliographic and musical research in Italy and abroad have permitted the rediscovery of the well-rounded personality that his contemporaries recognized in Allegri, and, from this point of view, quite apart from a world premier recording of exceptional importance, the pieces contained in the Altemps manuscripts undoubtedly constitute a new chapter to add to the history of sacred music.

Born in Rome in 1600 in a family of musical traditions, Giovanni Felice Sances owes his musical education first to the Roman environment, and then to the Venetian, strongly influenced by the genius of Monteverdi that in those days was dominating unchallenged. The turning point of Sances life however, occurred at thirty-six when he was hired at the Imperial Chapel of Vienna, first as singer, and then - known for his skills - as main composer and favorite of the emperor; he retained this position until his death, leaving the Imperial Chapel an impressive number of compositions. The Capricci Poetici, printed in Venice in 1649 and dedicated to the noble Nicolò Sagredo, Venetian ambassador to the imperial court and later Doge of Venice, it was just one of the many works that allowed Sances of highlighting his compositional talent through which came to build up over time, the peak of the Imperial Chapel. Irene Morelli and Beatrice Mercuri voices deliver with great property of style the texts of these arias and cantatas, where Sances abandons the modal language typical of the sixteenth century and goes towards a wise use of tonal innovations, highlighting the salient moments of the text and the alternation of the “affetti”.

This is the fifth volume of Alessandro Scarlatti's complete works for keybaord series. Francesco Tasini plays the 1836 organ, located in the basilica of S. Maria di Campagna. This unique organ is perfectly suited to the Toccatas, Sonatas and Follias from the great master from Palermo.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The city of Modena, under the rule of the Este family, was the capital of the Dukedom of Modena e Reggio. Thanks to Duke Francesco II's fondness for the violin, music became an essential element in the most important events at the Este court, such as receptions, weddings and official visits of foreign sovereigns. These were the occasions in which the Duke displayed all his magnificence. Modena stands out for the abundance of it's collection of musical documents in the Biblioteca Estense: the library is a real mine, largely unexplored so far. This consideration gave rise to the idea of making this beautiful, extraordinarily modern music available to those who are "pursuing" culture and art. So our goal is to promote a rediscovery of the enormous heritage preserved in the Biblioteca Estense, by carrying out a meticulous study of the sources of the works of the composers who were active at the Este Court in Modena, transcribing them into modern notation and critical editions, and producing monographic recordings of them. The first step consisted in the study and recording of the instrumental works of Giovanni Battista Vitali. In this second of 6 albums dedicated to his music preserved at the Estense Library of Modena, the baroque group Italico Splendore is introducing us to the sonatas for two violins and continuo op. 2 that, due to their destination (for both chamber and church), are characterized by a brilliant and lively score, anticipating the concerting style that would have emerged a generation later, thanks to Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi.

Within this monographic album, soprano Gabriella Morigi and pianist Adriano Tumiatti are rediscovering the vocal chamber music repertoire by Francesco Balilla Pratella belonging to the Italian Futurism, the historical literary, artistic and political movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. The Futurism has left us great literary and figurative masterpieces yet, on it's musical level, has been almost forgotten, partly due to it's contemporaneity with the most famous "Generation of the Eighty." After the Great War the wave of the futurist revolt came to weaken and Pratella devoted himself to ethnomusicological research publishing important studies and collections concerning the Italian folklore, and in particular that of his homeland, the Romagna region.