Il Gusto 22

It's great to see the music of Nino Rota getting so much attention. He was a wonderful composer, and the ballet suite from La strada may be his orchestral masterpiece (just a quick note: the French language title identifies this as a suite from the eponymous film; it is in fact the more familiar arrangement of the later ballet). There are now four competitive recordings of this piece, the least interesting of which is on Chandos with the Teatro Massimo orchestra: not bad, but not as well played or recorded as either Muti's slightly stiff version with the excellent La Scala forces, or Atma's brilliant recent release featuring the Greater Montréal Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. All of the couplings differ in various ways, though Muti also has the dances from Il gattopardo (The Leopard).

Recentemente si è rivalutata l”importanza di Alessandro anche come vero fondatore dell”importante «scuola tastieristica napoletana», della grande tradizione di una città, Napoli, «considerata come la capitale dell”armonia, la sorgente da cui si sono irradiati, in ogni altra parte d”Europa, il genio, il gusto e la cultura» (CHARLES BURNEY, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, London 1771).

In the early 1670s, soon after Venetian opera became established in Naples, a series of comic figures began to inhabit secular but also sacred operas. These stock characters included the Neapolitan, the Calabrian and the Boy, and all three plus a fourth, ‘The Spaniard’, appear in a comic intermezzo inserted in the 1673 opera Il disperato innocente by the little-known Francesco Antonio Boero. This is the oldest surviving Neapolitan comic intermezzo, and, along with its Prologue, seems to have been written by other authors. This video preserves a historically informed performance given by Antonio Florio with Pino De Vittorio that explores the tradition of the intermezzo in 17th century plots.

With the complete recording of Bach's organ works on various instruments, Jörg Halubek's "Bach Organ Landscapes" project paints a panorama of organ landscapes and organ building traditions. Since 2020, he has portrayed nine different locations and their unique organs on six double albums to date. With a careful eye for the unique cultural heritage of the instruments of the Bach regions, he is in search of the original Bach sound.