Zelenka Il Diamante Ensemble Inégal

In the Italian society of the early eighteenth century, the musical genre of the chamber cantata was popular as a refined form of entertainment. The chamber cantata is a relatively short composition, consisting of a couple of arias with the addition of one or two recitatives. They were performed in the private ambiances of the noble circles. A performance just needed the instruments of the basso continuo (harpsichord, cello, and if wanted for example a lute) and of course an excellent voice.

Following the tradition of Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and his society for private musical performances, all the pieces in this production were completely redesigned and masterfully arranged by the principal horn player of the Vienna Philharmonic, Josef Reif, in order to make them performable in a reduced formation and in smaller venues. The Theophil Ensemble Wien under the musical direction of Matthias Schorn, together with Theresa Grabner (soprano) and Daniel Schmutzhard (baritone), uncovers completely new perspectives on titles played millions of times and enables very intense, dense and intimate listening experiences through the “luxury of reduction”. Convince yourself: if you want to feel, you have to listen!

Venice was surely the capital of music and the arts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and one of the most coveted positions in the city was that of maestro di cappella at St Mark’s Basilica.

Newcomers to the music of the 19th century sometimes wonder why there are so few Italian compositions in genres of "absolute" music: symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas. As the booklet notes for this release on the fine German audiophile label MDG point out, the reason is that the institutions supporting these genres were almost completely absent in Italy, whose musical life was organized around the opera. The exception was the municipal wind band, which served as a regional training ground for opera orchestra musicians. This album presents a group of all-but-unknown small chamber pieces for winds by Amilcare Ponchielli, best known for his opera La Gioconda and specifically for the Dance of the Hours instrumental interlude, known to pop fans as "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh."

Dorothee Oberlinger brought another musical treasure to light last year at the Potsdam Music Festival. "I Portentosi Effetti della madre Natura by Giuseppe Scarlatti had its premiere in the then brand-new Palace Theatre of the New Palace in Sanssouci - with resounding success. Some 250 years later, the work, which stylistically seems to have been written five minutes before Mozart, with a mix of great seria arias and rousing folk echoes, experienced its celebrated resurrection as a production of the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci with the Ensemble 1700 and singers under the artistic direction of Dorothee Oberlinger. The production accompanying the performances will now be released as a world premiere recording on 9 June as a co-production with Musikfestspiele Potsdam and rbb Kultur on the deutsche harmonia mundi label.