Dialoghi

The music on this disc comes from Rome in the middle seventeenth century, and it is seemingly, to use a word that recurs several times in the dense but informative booklet, paradoxical. Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665) was a composer who worked at the feet of popes. Yet the music here is stylistically of the sensuous seconda prattica, the operatic art of Monteverdi and his cohorts in the generation before. If the term "Counter Reformation" brings to mind music like Palestrina's, know that you get something very different here, something closer to the religious masterworks of Monteverdi's later career but on a more intimate scale.

Ensemble Dialoghi makes their harmonia mundi début with this program of quintets for piano and winds. A work of 'maturity,' which the twenty-eight year-old Mozart considered ''among his best,'' is paired with a 'youthful effort' penned by a twenty-six year-old Beethoven. Dating from an auspicious phase in each composer's career, both pieces were met with an enthusiastic reception. Beethoven, it was said, was inspired by Mozart's piece and composed his in tribute. The theatrical character of these works is not lost on the high-spirited virtuosos who make up this period-instrument ensemble.