Labirinto

Giovanni Antonio Piani was a son of the Bolognese musician Pietro Giacomo Piani, who played the trumpet in the Neapolitan court. He was born in 1678 in Naples, where he studied the violin at the Conservatory under the guidance of Giovan Carlo Cailò and Nicola Vinciprova. He became a skillful violinist and had a brilliant career, which led him first to Paris, then, from 1721 to at least 1757, to the imperial court of Vienna, where he was the best-paid performer with orchestra conducting functions from 1741 onwards. The only musical work by Piani that is known to us and was published in Paris in 1712 is the collection entitled in Italian “Sonate / a Violino solo e Violoncello col Cimbalo […] Opera Prima”. Poised between the Italian and French styles, the Piani sonatas are accompanied by various graphic marks on the score that the composer is using for suggesting dynamic expressions or articulations as explained within the "Avvertimenti" (Warnings) addressed to the performer, and to which the Ensemble Labirinto Armonico, led by Pierluigi Mencattini, pays the correct attention for obtaining an interpretation that fully respects the intentions of the author.

The ‘Eric Clapton of the lute’ (BBC Magazine) comes back to the Alpha microphones, this time with the soprano Anna Reinhold. Here, Thomas Dunford applies his truly prodigious virtuosity to the eight Toccatas from the first book by Meister Kapsberger, giving us a veritable concert such as the composer himself might have proposed with, in counterpoint to the toccatas, a few of the loveliest airs by Caccini, Merula et al. The beauty of Anna Reinhold’s voice (a young talent noticed especially in William Christie’s ‘Jardin des voix’) has a freshness and energy that bring to mind the young performers at work in Alpha’s earliest recordings. This goes to prove that there still remains much distance to cover in the discovery of Baroque art.

Based in the Brazilian capital of São Paulo, the TORMENTA collective has long offered an alternative vision of the city's rich and colorful musical heritage…

Nuova Generazione Jazz 2021 winner and Maastricht Jazz Awards finalist Francesca Remigi is a polyhedric drummer and a visionary composer known for her international collaborations with Steve Lehman, Joachim Florent, Kris Davis and John Patitucci, with appearances at EFG London Jazz Festival 2020 and Panama Jazz Festival 2021. Her first album Il Labirinto Dei Topi was released in January 2021. The album "Il Labirinto Dei Topi" draws its inspiration from some socio-political concepts theorized by writers such as Noam Chomsky, Zygmunt Bauman, Roberto Saviano, Samuel Huntington, and aims to express some of the controversial topics and poisonous paradoxes of our time, such as the liquidity of social relationships, the decadence of the concept of “society” as perceived nowadays, the capitalist free market- based economy’s failure, the evolution of mafia-like criminal organizations, the weapons’ trade growth, the development of an almighty and unbridled individualism…

Published in 1733, Pietro Locatelli’s L'Arte del violino for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo took both violin technique and the solo concerto as a genre into a whole new realm. The twelve concertos included in the collection also played a part in forming the image of the violin virtuoso, reaching its full bloom with Paganini towards the end of the century. While the unusually high technical demands of the solo part are obvious to the listener from the start, the great surprise comes at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos. Here Locatelli inserts Capriccios for the soloist alone of a difficulty previously unheard of, with a left hand technique making use of extensions, octaves, unprepared tenths, double and triple stopping, arpeggios and double trills.