Ex Novo Ensemble

Only months after ASV's selection of chamber music by Nino Rota, which I reviewed in the May issue, here is another disc to prove that his output was not restricted to his highly effective film scores. This one is by an expert Milanese group, newly formed by the pianist Massimo Palumbo. Its programme overlaps with ASV's in the two postwar trios; at slightly slower speeds, Chandos's Ensemble Nino Rota gets rather more out of these essays in very mild modernism than ASV's Ex Novo Ensemble.

In collaboration with the Opéra de Nice and with the Ensemble Baroque de Nice, Dynamic releases a Vivaldian rarity, Rosmira Fedele, first staged at Venice’s Teatro Sant’Angelo on 27th January 1738. Written on a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia, Rosmira Fedele is the last opera by Vivaldi that has come down to us. Written three years before the composer’s death, this work heralds the end of one of the most fertile theatrical careers in the history of music.

Giampaolo Pretto is the main conductor of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino, in Italy from 2016, and has been coach conductor of the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana in Fiesole from 2012 until 2018. As a conductor whose career is constantly increasing, he always aimed to face the most different repertoire and he choose from the beginning to cope with the more different styles and composers, from classic up to contemporary music. He closed the 2015 season of Petruzzelli Theatre in Bari performing Ravel, Battistelli, Stravinsky and Copland, while opening the 2015-16 Season of OFT in Torino with Mahler’s IX. He conducted the italian première of the Bach/Stravinsky "Four préludes and fugue for chamber orchestra", together with Paganiniana di Casella, at the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto; Brahms Serenade op. 11 in Tbilisi and in Italy during the georgian orchestra Paliashvili tour ; Pergolesi Stabat Mater in Florence with the Orchestra V. Galilei.

Vox Iberica – Sequentia’s long-term project to record music from three of Spain’s most important musical sources – begins with music from the so-called Codex Calixtinus, a 12th century manuscript containing liturgical chant and polyphony in honour of Saint James the Apostle, otherwise known as Santiago, whose relics have been venerated by pilgrims since the Middle Ages in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. For this recording, the eight men’s voices of Sequentia join to record the complete polyphony found in this magnificent collection of sacred music, including some of the earliest polyphony to be clearly notated in a European source.