Alberto Luca Recchi

This simple celebratory cantata made Stradella a well-known theatrical personality. As opposed to using traditional recitative, Stradella incorporates string interludes interrupting the characters, which allowed them to express emotions during facial expressions and movement, a novelty during the Baroque era. The Concerto Madrigalesco performs these works extraordinarily with historical performance practices.

This recording features a work with a strange coincidence in its compositional process and an astonishing dual authorship. Remarkably, Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Lute Suite SW47 (which he named Suonata) also comes with a violin part that can be played over the top of it, composed by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. A recent comparison of sources revealed that the harpsichord part in Bach’s Suite for Violin & Harpsichord BWV1025, long considered to be of doubtful attribution, perfectly matches Weiss’s suite. The violin part, meanwhile, was indeed composed entirely by Bach and is an additional melody independent of Weiss’s musical material. It feels almost like a ‘free improvisation’ above the suite and recalls a similar process carried out by Charles Gounod in 1859: his Ave Maria fits over the first Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier BWV846. The sole exception is the Fantasia movement in Bach’s piece, which is not derived from Weiss’s suite, meaning both the violin and harpsichord parts in it are unique to Bach.

Luca N. Stradivari (1993) is a composer and pianist of his own music. After he graduated at the University of Nottingham, he started to hold composition seminars and concerts in China since 2018. He writes: “The first part of this release is marked by the performance of The King is Dead – shipwreck for violin and piano. A reworking case for duet – Luca N. Stradivari on the piano and Luca Fanfoni on the violin – of the concert for wind orchestra and violin solo based on the First World War, performed in 2012 in Salò on lake Garda for its annual music festival.

The splendour and cultural heritage of Humanism contain an intricate network of intuitions and revolutions – that are often local or have developed in geographically or politically well defined areas – of culture and of its representation in society: an unlimited theatricalisation of reality, in which each gesture, symbol and behaviour is transformed into an active component of the greatness and beauty of the Court and of its main actuators.In a picturesque fresco of this rich era - musical heir of the Middle Ages - the Anonima Frottolisti ensemble offers a cross-section of the main aspects that characterized it: power, love, celebration, dance, and faith, through an imaginary journey in the wonder of the Italian courts of the fifteenth century.