Francesco Furlan

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.

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the opportunity to be able to explore these comparatively little-known compositions – two of which are still completely unpublished (no piano recordings of the sonatas BWV 969 and 970 exist to date) – composed by one of the most important geniuses in the history of music.

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the opportunity to be able to explore these comparatively little-known compositions – two of which are still completely unpublished (no piano recordings of the sonatas BWV 969 and 970 exist to date) – composed by one of the most important geniuses in the history of music.

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombes life is largely shrouded in mystery, and almost nothing was known of his music until these Concerts deux violes esgales were discovered in Geneva in 1966. Full of inspiration and fantasy, these pieces are often technically very demanding, innovatively deploying the viols entire range and putting players to the test in ways that were unprecedented in French viol literature. The sound of the viols is as haunting as the musics titles are teasingly expressive, and for their extraordinary imagination, originality and rare sonic splendour these works are justly considered one of the great monuments of European Baroque music.

Songs Of Love From The American Songbook is a 2022 album by Lorna Windsor & Gian Francesco Amoroso and released on Da Vinci Classics label.

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.