D'avino Marco

The considerable fame that Bartolomeo Campagnoli (1751–1827) achieved during his own lifetime was largely due to his contribution to violin studies. The 41 Caprices he wrote for viola and the 7 Divertimenti for solo violin are still in use today. Campagnoli’s career as a concert performer began in Rome in 1775, continuing in a long tour of the courts of the capital cities of Europe. In 1797 he was made concert director and first violin at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, a post that he held until 1818, although he also maintained his contacts with the most advanced and influential cultural centres of Europe. He thus enjoyed a florid exchange with some of the most famous teachers and Nevertheless, there is an unmistakably composers of the time, in particular with Cherubini and Kreutzer. The idea that ‘true expression depends on the sound, intonation, movement, taste and aplomb of the measure’ was a constant tenet with Campagnoli, as was his insistence on the need to understand clearly the character of each piece in order to appreciate to the full the composer’s intentions. All this required respect for the exact point in which embellishments have to be added (without exceeding), because: ‘nothing is more beautiful and moving than what is simple’.

Despite his name, Federigo Fiorillo (1755-1823) was German by birth, the third son of a violinist who had studied in Naples with Francesco Durante and Leonardo Leo. Federigo followed in his father’s footsteps as an instrumental virtuoso, both on violin and mandolin; the 19th-century musicologist Fétis praised him as ‘one of the most remarkable violinists of his time’ in the Biographie universelle des musiciens.

Marco Albonetti writes: ‘”Amarcord” signifies memory, the nostalgic re-enactment of the past. Here, it evokes the idea of joining two instruments, the saxophone and the bandoneón, both of which were invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. The bandoneón, created as a more agile substitute for the organ in the world of sacred music in Germany, was brought by German immigrants to Buenos Aires, where it became central to the tango, a music enlivened by rhythmic ideas from Africa and inextricably linked to dance.

Born in Rome in 1678 to a family of German extraction, Nicola Francesco Haym was employed (from 1694 to 1700) as a violone and cello player by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the orchestra led by Arcangelo Corelli. In the final years of this period the 2nd Duke of Bedford (Wriothesley Russell, 1680-1711) visited Rome and invited the violinist Nicola Cosimi to follow his entourage back to London. Cosimi in turn invited Haym to come with him as continuo cellist. Haym therefore moved to London in 1701 and would serve as the Duke of Bedford’s ‘master of chamber music’ until the patron’s death in 1711. A significant number of Haym’s compositions were produced during this first period in his life, among them diverse instrumental music for concerts at the ducal residences.

Little is known about one of the most productive of Italian musicians, Adriano Banchieri. Relegated to a marginal sector of Renaissance history, still defined by madrigals, Banchieri lived in the most extraordinary innovative period of Italian 'harmonic' music: we find clear signs of a new 17th-Century sensibility in adaptation, or rather in making the word serve representational needs, in the use of the basso concertante and in the extensive use of continuo. The two works presented on this CD represent the chronological heart of Banchieri’s most typical production and may be appreciated in modern recordings for the first time: this is an ambitious project to shed light on Italian 'minor' musical history of the end of the 16th century.

A 17th-century manuscript that was compiled by Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court, where he related to many European diplomats, clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and advisor. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.