Pietro Ballerini Puviani

Per celebrare il quinto centenario della morte di Leonardo da Vinci, il genio italiano che nel suo Trattato della pittura scrisse «La musica non è da essere chiamata altro che sorella della pittura», la Elegia Classics è orgogliosa di presentare un disco interamente dedicato a Franchinus Gaffurius, compositore lodigiano oggi quasi dimenticato, ma che ebbe lo straordinario onore di venire ritratto da Leonardo. Il programma è imperniato intorno alla Missa De Carnaval, una delle sue opere più significative, composta per l’ultima domenica prima della quaresima del rito ambrosiano, alla quale fanno corona alcuni mottetti di suggestiva bellezza, che tratteggiano un affascinante spaccato del panorama musicale negli ultimi anni del XV secolo.

What little is known of Pietro Migali’s life has been deduced from his will, which gives us his likely dates and some biographical information, as well as from his only extant publication, the Trio Sonatas, Op. 1. Probably born around 1635 and deceased after the will's date of 1715, Migali was a native of the southern Italian city of Lecce, though his musical education is thought to have taken him to Naples or Rome. His role as Maestro di Capella is known from the sonatas' title page, though there is no other information about his career or other works. Yet the high quality of his compositions is evident from this 2017 release by Ensemble BariAntiquA, and judging from the inventiveness of his music, Migali must have mastered his craft through other compositions and assiduous study.

The Italian opera of the 17th century is a part of music history which is still hardly explored. Of course, Claudio Monteverdi's operas are regularly performed and recorded, and some of the stage works by his pupil Francesco Cavalli, the main composer of operas in Venice after Monteverdi's death has been given attention to, but many other works written in Italy in the 17th century are still to be rediscovered. One of the composers of that time whose works are hardly explored is Pietro Antonio Cesti. From the tracklist one may conclude that he was a prolific composer of operas. René Jacobs has been an avid advocate of Cesti's oeuvre, and in 1982 he made a recording of L'Orontea, arias from which he also performed at the concert in 1980 recorded and only recently released by ORF. He also gave performances of L'Argia, but so far that hasn't been recorded on disc.

World-premiere recording: Pietro Gnocchi was not only cathedral chapel master in the northern Italian city of Brescia, and indeed for over a half a century until his death at the advanced age of eighty-six, but also a priest, archeologist, geographer, and fluent in many languages. Apart from sacred vocal music, this impressive polymath also left behind several instrumental works: surprisingly, the present concertos for stringed instruments and basso continuo are heavily contrapuntal, much is inspired by the stilo antico.

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.