Nicola Zitara

This is an exciting performance. Gabriele Lavia’s steampunk production is stylish and plays up the violence and tension that underpin the opera. Nicola Luisotti’s conducting does likewise, as he is sharp and authoritative but also allows the music to breath naturally. The cast is excellent.(Opera Now)

Guitarist Nicola Conte's sixth recording as a leader is a vocal tour de force, as five different singers split up duties on select tracks. With a substantial horn section pulled from the jazz ranks, Conte takes on the role of producer more than instrumentalist, while exploring various strains of Latin jazz backings for his words and music that are mostly from his personal book of tunes.

The Sablé festival, held annually in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in France, has its own recording concern that it uses primarily to expose young early music artists and to support the most interesting of their projects; the Zig-Zag Territoires label provides an outlet for this endeavor. Here is a wholly worthy enterprise: the group Gli Incogniti – led by the fabulous young violinist Amandine Beyer – in a program drawn from various works of mysterious late seventeenth-century violinist Nicola Matteis, its title, False Consonances of Melancholy, fashioned after one of his publications, but not limited to its contents. As Matteis is not a household name, some summary of his place in the scheme of things is not out of order here: born in Naples, possibly contemporary to Heinrich von Biber, Matteis was an itinerant musician in Germany before making his way to London about 1670.

After having enchanted us with Porpora's Notturni, the Dolce & Tempesta Ensemble now reveals new hidden treasures of the Neapolitan School. A rival of Domenico de Matteis, the irascible violinist Nicola Fiorenza (ca. 1700 - 1764) used to strike his pupils with his sword at the conservatory Santa Maria di Loreto in Naples while writing delightful works, full of inventiveness, charm and fancy. His concerti grossi are played with the brilliance and tastefulness which characterise the extraordinary Italian virtuoso ensemble founded by harpsichordist Stefano Demicheli. A programme never before recorded and the discovery of a forgotten and most endearing character!