Attilio

When producer Rocco Pandiani approached Maestro Attilio Zanchi about collaborating on an album for Mono Jazz label, he discovered Zanchi's longstanding passion project: a tribute to jazz legend Charles Mingus, which he had nurtured for two decades with a close-knit group of musicians. Initially, Pandiani had a different project in mind, so to convince him, Zanchi swiftly organized a concert in Milan featuring the full septet. The electrifying performance ended with the audience ecstatically cheering and dancing. Impressed, Rocco agreed to proceed with the record production, which took place three months later at Novenove studio in Milan.

At the age of 29 Hasse was on his first visit to Italy when he wrote 'La Contadina' in Naples. The music of the intermezzo, which sparkles with wit and temperament, enjoyed such a great success that a total of 38 productions in major European opera houses can be documented between 1728 and 1769. 'La Contadina' was one of the hits of the 18th century.

The Italian Steffani spent most of his fabulous career as a composer, spy, and diplomat in Germany, in München and Hanover, with a prolonged visit to Paris to the court of Louis XIV. In terms of the prevalent national styles of music in the late 17th C, Steffani was "all over the place" – his overtures are thoroughly French, his arias sparklingly Italian, and his mastery of counterpoint profoundly German. Does that stylistic Duke's Mixture ring any bells? A certain pair of Germans born in 1685, one revered for his cantatas and the other for his operas, were both indebted to Steffani for his synthesis of Italian, French, and German fashions.

The novelties here are the Mattheson works, the first two fully composed, the third a figured-bass exercise from Mattheson's treatise on the subject. The sonata is a dramatic, virtuoso outing in the Italian style; the suite, ostensibly more french in character, retains a typical German heaviness.

Attilio Ariosti was a particularly versatile Italian composer, musician and poet, known throughout Europe. As an operatic composer his name was joined in London by those of Handel and Bononcini, and his 'Carillano' of 1723 and 'Vespasiano' of 1724 were much acclaimed. The cycle of Six Cantatas 'The Flowering and Fading of Love', only recently discovered and here receiving its first recording, forms a sonnet sequence about the journey of love, ranging from 'La Rosa' (the Rose) to 'Il Naufragio' (The Shipwreck) and the final 'La Gelosia' (Jealousy).

Australia's most exciting opera company, Pinchgut Opera has attracted rave reviews since making its debut with Handel's Semele in 2002. ABC Classics has been with Pinchgut all the way, releasing all five of their previous productions on CD to critical acclaim; the magic continues with Pinchgut's performance of Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans. Enter a world of musical ecstasy with the exquisite voices of Pinchgut and the subtle beauty of rare Baroque instruments in Vivaldi's gripping tale of virtue, passion and revenge.