Carlo Iii

The soprano Daniela Dessì died suddenly on 20th August 2016, aged 59. She was hailed by critics and colleagues as one of the finest voices the world of opera has ever known. Dynamic pays tribute to the great soprano with this recording, filmed just one year before her untimely death. Her performance of Giordano’s Fedora was one of the pinnacles of her stunning artistic career. In the famous aria O grandi occhi lucenti from Act One, she delivers a technically perfect and emotionally passionate performance worthy of a great star. The story takes place at the end of the 19th century, in St. Petersburg (Act One), Paris (Act Two) and Switzerland (Act Three).

The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and conductor Carlo Montanaro present a powerful interpretation of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, together with a cast of soloists including Melody Moore (Tosca), Ștefan Pop (Cavaradossi) and Lester Lynch (Scarpia). Tosca has been an audience favourite from the onset. Premiered in 1900, it marks the beginning of twentieth- century opera, in which sex, violence and the uncanny abysses of the human psyche would be explored, inspiring composers to expand the musical means of expression in all thinkable ways.

Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.

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 concertos from the seventh opus 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.

Born in 1804, Louise Farrenc became a professional-standard pianist while still a teenager, and later music teacher to the household of the Duke d’Orléans and from 1842 professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. Her substantial legacy of composition was largely forgotten after her death in 1875 and is only now being revived. She wrote mainly in the field of orchestral and chamber music: ‘I would defy anyone,’ says the pianist Linda Di Carlo in a personal introduction to this new recording of Farrenc’s music for violin and piano, ‘to cast aspersions on the chamber music in particular on the grounds of her gender.’