Isabella Bison, Marco Frezzato, Francesco Corti

With Contra-Tenor, Michael Spyres challenges perceptions of the tenor in the Baroque era, often seen as the age of the castrato. In the company of Il Pomo d’Oro and conductor Francesco Corti, he explores the period from the late 17th century to the 1770s, tracing the course of opera in both the French and Italian styles. The 15 arias range from Lully to early Mozart by way of Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, Gluck and composers such as Hasse, Galuppi and Latilla (represented by world premiere recordings), and Mazzoni and Sarro (represented by first studio recordings). Spyres’ exceptional credentials for this virtuoso repertoire have been summed up by Gramophone magazine: a “superb artist whose voice [is] perfectly equalised over more than two-and-a-half octaves,” notable for “exceptional artistry, formidable technique and seemingly limitless understanding of style.”

This double album accompanies the eponymous book by Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2023). They are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence.Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano. Our goal in assembling this set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a "virtual" evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance. Through the integration of the contents of the book and the CDs, and leveraging text, image, musical notation, and sound, we offer our listeners the possibility of a fascinating metaphoric time travel.

Under the direction of the principal conductor and artistic director of the Salzburg Mozart Week, Mark Minkowski, the Musiciens du Louvre perform on two of Mozart’s original instruments. Mozart’s Violin Concerto and his Piano Concerto in A major are played on instruments that were once in the composer’s possession. Thibault Noally plays the Violin Concerto on a violin from the workshop of Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa and “conjures up Romantic brilliance from the well maintained instrument”, then Francesco Corti brings Mozart’s fortepiano to life again, thereby spreading “collective Mozart happiness all round” (Salzburger Nachrichten).