Trabaci

Over the past three or four decades early music has changed from elitist and hardly known to being widely performed and appreciated. With the growing popularity of early music the recorder has emancipated from that rather ill-reputed “instrument to introduce children to music” to a serious musical instrument in its own right. Several highly successful recorder ensembles and soloists are proof of this change.

Few news are available about Antonio Nola. Even research manuals and encyclopedic dictionaries make no mention of the author.According to the news reported by Hanns-Berthold Dietz, Antonio Nola was born in 1642 from Tommaso Nola and Laura Rossa and at the age of 10, in 1652, he became a pupil of Giovanni Salvatore at the Conservatorio dei Turchini in Naples. In 1674 he was regularly in the service of the Oratory of the Gerolamini, an institution in which he remained for a long time, copying much sacred music for the needs of the Oratory and collaborating with many musicians in the service of that institution, from Giovanni Maria Trabaci, Scipione Dentice (nephew of Fabrizio Dentice), Giovanni Maria Sabino and the M. of the royal chapel Filippo Coppola and Erasmo di Bartolo ("Padre Raimo").

If you like attractive, expertly performed music for plucked strings, then these original compositions and arrangements of Italian renaissance works for chitarrone, chitarra spagnola (five-course Spanish guitar), and arpa doppia (double harp) will surely delight. Every work here is pleasant and tuneful–a few even aspire to greater musical heights. Frescobaldi's Partite Sopra Passacalgli, for example, benefits from Stephen Stubbs and Maxine Eilander's arrangement, which, while sacrificing a measure of the harpsichord's original edge, nonetheless heightens the chromaticism and texture of the evolving fugue.

At the end of a brief but brilliant career - his compositions cover a period of just over six years - Giovanni Battista Pergolesi worte his last two works, the 'Stabat Mater' and the 'Salve Regina' in C minor. Nicola Porpora's 'Salve Regina' for solo voice and instruments, recorded here for the first time, was probably written during the composer's stay in Venice as 'maestro di cappella' of the Ospedale degli Incurabili, from 1726 to 1733, no doubt for one of the young ladies attending the musical establishment.