Brunello Violoncello

Since winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1986, Mario Brunello has established himself as one of the foremost living cellists. An eclectic musician, for some years Brunello has also taken an interest in the world of historically informed performance practice and the rediscovery of the four-string ‘violoncello piccolo’. This instrument, slightly smaller than the cello, is known today for its presence in some sacred cantatas of Bach, but it was surely used much more widely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than the currently known repertory would lead us to think.This recording of the Sonate & Partite per violino solo inaugurates the collaboration on the Arcana label with a ‘Bach Brunello Series’ of three CDs, in which important compositions for the violin from his catalogue will be performed on the violoncello piccolo. The booklet includes texts by Bach scholar Peter Wollny and Italian writer Alessandro Baricco.

Polish-born Mieczysław Weinberg twice escaped from Nazi invasions, finally settling in Moscow, where for more than 30 years he was Shostakovich’s closest musical friend. Composer of 26 symphonies, seventeen string quartets and seven operas, he was also a master of the solo string sonata, a genre not touched by Shostakovich and little cultivated in the Soviet Union. His four sonatas for cello solo were composed between 1960 and 1985 and enshrine some of his most concentrated and poetic inspirations.

After the success of their Tartini disc (Arcana 478, Diapason d'or, 5 stars from Musica), Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell'Annunciata return for an ingenious collection of six concertos, all of which are transcriptions of other works. Not only do we hear the keyboard arrangements of Venetian concertos such as Marcello's famous oboe concerto and Vivaldi's Violin Concerto RV230, but also reconstructed concertos by Bach such as those for oboe and oboe d'amore (BWV 1056 and 1055) and those that have come down to us in their original version — from the Violin Concerto BWV 1042 up to and including the renowned Concerto nach Italienischen Gusto BWV 971. The dialogue between the tutti and the solo passages in the latter work, only imagined in its keyboard version, here finds its full realisation in Riccardo Doni's brilliant transcription for piccolo cello and strings, supported here by the energy and passion of the Accademia dell'Annunciata.

After mastering the Sonatas and Partitas, Mario Brunello continues his trilogy devoted to reinterpreting Bach’s violin masterpieces on the violoncello piccolo.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Tartini, Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell’Annunciata commemorate one of the great partnerships in the history of eighteenth-century music: the relationship between Tartini and Antonio Vandini, a cellist born in Bologna (cradle of the Italian cello school).

Mario Brunello begins his collaboration with the Arcana label with a three-volume project: the “Bach Brunello Series”, in which he plays well-known pieces by Bach originally conceived for violin on the violoncello piccolo, an instrument Bach also used and appreciated.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Tartini, Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell’Annunciata commemorate one of the great partnerships in the history of eighteenth-century music: the relationship between Tartini and Antonio Vandini, a cellist born in Bologna (cradle of the Italian cello school), active in Padua for fifty years, and the author of the first biography of Tartini, whom he had known since the 1720s.

After mastering the Sonatas and Partitas, Mario Brunello continues his trilogy devoted to reinterpreting Bach’s violin masterpieces on the violoncello piccolo. In this second volume he tackles the other great collection, the Sei Suonate a cembalo certato e violino solo (Six sonatas for concertato harpsichord and solo violin). Conceived in three parts, like sonatas for two treble instruments and continuo, these famous pieces appear transfigured here in a kaleidoscope of colours in which the violoncello piccolo intertwines with the keyboard, alternately harpsichord and organ, and with the bass doubled in turn by viola da gamba and cello – an accompaniment specifically suggested by one of the surviving copies of the sonatas. "A reinterpretation with an amber hue, in search of the intimate and human characteristics that are revealed almost unexpectedly in the slow movements and the expressiveness of the fugato themes in the fast movements, where Bach shows unparalleled virtuosity in distributing the voices".

Violinist Giuliano Carmignola and cellist Mario Brunello: one of the greatest interpreters of Vivaldi and Bach, whose recent recording of the Sonatas and Partitas was described by the authoritative magazine Gramophone as ‘a definite first choice among period instrument recordings of these works’; and his long-time friend Mario Brunello, acclaimed for his personal reinterpretation of that same famous collection on the violoncello piccolo (A469).