La Montagna Sei Tu. Trasformare L'autosabotaggio in Autocontrollo

Arcana's O tu chara Sciença, featuring Italian period instrument and vocal ensemble La Reverdie, is quite simply one of the best-ever recordings of music from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Firstly, the very premise of the program transmits a complete understanding of the theoretical function of music in the late middle ages; music, at least among the learned, was neither an empty entertainment offered in the court or public square, nor was it purely understood as something to hang a sacred service upon to help it turn corners more smoothly. Music was a science on a level with mathematics, astronomy, and geometry.

Meyerbeer composed Il Crociato in just over one year, between September 1822 and the following autumn, at the end of the German composer's so-called "Italian period". Although this is an opera of great dramatic and musical complexity its première was highly successful with both audience and critics, one commentator accurately describing it as "a building of highlyapplauded construction". The plot, so rich in events, skilfully weaves historical-religious elements with private happenings and feelings. Against the background of the interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims, the story of the main characters unfolds in an efficacious alternation of grand choral scenes and solo numbers with arias and cabalettas.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.

Giovanni Sgambati, a composer admired by Wagner, was the man Busoni predicted would take Italian music ‘towards a bright new future’. Sgambati’s Symphony No. 2 is a compendium of Austro-Germanic devices whose mix of chromaticism and melodic invention is invigorating. Lost for decades, it was reconstructed by Rosalind Trübger whose performing edition is recorded here. Sinfonia epitalamio was commissioned to celebrate a royal wedding. Loosely programmatic, this beautiful work embraces the pastoral and celebratory framed in the form of a symphonic poem.