Francesco Cavestri

Fabio Biondi’s immense curiosity for characterful music – especially of forgotten scores from the Baroque – yields another fabulous surprise with Francesco Feo’s oratorio San Francesco di Sales. Feo’s reputation is at last starting to wax after having waned dramatically in the nineteenth century and thenceforward: in his own age he was compared very highly with Bach and Handel, and Charles Burney was moved to describe his vocal music as being “full of fire and invention and force in the melody and expression of the words”; Feo was also a boon companion of Pergolesi.

The first monographic recording entirely dedicated to Francesco Rasi is released for the 400th anniversary of his death (30 November 1621). The first interpreter of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, an astonishing tenor and poet with a life studded with triumphs, constant travels, debts and murders, this native of Arezzo was fought over by all the courts of Italy and Europe. The pieces, on texts by Petrarch, Guarini, Chiabrera and Rasi himself – including ten world premieres – are taken from the Vaghezze di Musica (1608) and the Madrigali (1610). Tenor soloist Riccardo Pisani explores their extraordinary poetic and musical power, in a kaleidoscope of affects divided into seven ‘strings of the lyre’. He is accompanied by the Ensemble Arte Musica, directed by harpsichordist Francesco Cera. The two artists have been collaborating for years on rediscovering the Italian vocal repertory of the seventeenth century, as witnessed by the recent success of their set of Frescobaldi CDs, released on Arcana.

These songs for one and two voices come from the first four of D’India’s five books of Musiche, a series containing masterpieces of astonishing originality in the style of monody (solo melody with accompaniment), which had eclipsed the polyphonic madrigal in popularity at the dawn of the 17th century. With a career based largely in Turin and Rome, Sigismondo D’India nevertheless demonstrates stylistic links to both Monteverdi and Gesualdo, and it is the latter’s influence which supports new scholarship claiming D’India grew up in Naples (not Sicily) in the shadow of the great madrigalist’s free thinking on harmony. That very harmonic freedom – to accentuate key emotions in the text with piquant chord changes – is the hallmark of D’India’s own, self-styled ‘true manner’ of composing monody, adopted from Gesualdo’s intense, chromatic polyphony to the solo song or duet, and it suggests a Neapolitan, rather than Roman–Florentine, musical background.

Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (22 February 1909 - 21 August 1987) was an Italian composer, he was born in Genoa. He is best known for scoring many films, including Legend of the Lost, Conspiracy of Hearts, Gorgo, The Legion's Last Patrol, Daisy Miller, and two directed by Orson Welles, Othello and Chimes at Midnight. He also scored several peplums and spaghetti westerns.
Lavagnino won the Nastro d'Argento award for Best Score twice, for Continente perduto (1954) and Vertigine bianca (1956).

At the centre of this production are the sonatas for keyboard instruments BWV 963-970 by J. S. Bach, which are relatively unknown and only rarely performed, recorded or published. The Italian pianist Francesco Tropea came across these musical treasures during his research in the library of the Mozarteum in Salzburg and realised that there are only a few recordings of this music, mostly on old instruments and rarely on a modern piano. He was therefore grateful for the opportunity to be able to explore these comparatively little-known compositions – two of which are still completely unpublished (no piano recordings of the sonatas BWV 969 and 970 exist to date) – composed by one of the most important geniuses in the history of music.