Pietro Pasinato

A new enlightening box of mostly live and radio recordings by the intellectual among the pianists: Pietro Scarpini. ""A sterling achievement. For me, the whole series has been a voyage of discovery […] In terms of production quality and presentation. The Pietro Scarpini Edition gets my wholehearted recommendation for resuscitating the memory of a long-forgotten artist. (MusicWeb) Pietro Scarpini was called ""a pianist of prodigious capacities"" by New York Times critic Olin Downes after the performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. Though he studied conducting at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, as well as composition with Casella, to whom the Busoni Op 54 is dedicated, and with Respighi, it is as a pianist that realized his ultimate talent. Scarpini was a rare combination: a highly intellectual pianist with a virtuoso technique. He was a dignified and solitary person with a serious approach to music, single-mindedly following the course of his artistic convictions without compromise.

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.

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.

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.

If you're looking for a recording of Locatelli's complete Opus 8 Violin Sonatas, look no further. These 1994 recordings by the aptly named Locatelli Trio are not only superbly played and beautifully recorded, they have the singular virtue of being the only available recordings of the works. That's alright: with violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch at the helm, they are uniformly first-rate performances. Wallfisch is herself a superior period instrument player who balances the virtuoso demands of the music with its undeniable melodic charm and harmonic invention, and she leads cellist Richard Tunnicliffe and harpsichordist Paul Nicholson in performances that amaze as well as delight the listener. Furthermore, when the trio becomes a quartet with the addition of violinist Rachel Isserlis for the final four sonatas for two violins and continuo, the best gets even better through the brilliant interplay of two skilled soloists. For lovers of virtuoso violin music of the Italian High Baroque, this is as good as it gets. Hyperion's sound is crisp but warm, detailed but deep.

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!

The long life of Don Pietro Gnocchi remains largely a mystery. We know the precise periods during which he worked at the Cathedral in Brescia, first as Maestro di Cappella, from 16th June 1723, and then as organist, from 10th April 1762 until his death; but apart from this, biographers seem to have simply passed back and forth what little information they possessed without reference to its source. As such, may aspects of his musical life are still to be determined: his early musical education in Alfianello and Bresica, the subsequent move to Venice and the Basilica of St. Marks, pupil of a Maestro di Cappella, and the exhausting travelling to the courts of Europe where he was very highly acclaimed, together with his "trusty companion, excellent player upon the violin.”

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.