This release is part of last summer’s project to record for DVD all 22 of Mozart’s operas in performances from the Salzburg Festival. This is the only one of the 22 that I have seen so far, but from the trailer, it looks like none of the productions are traditional… FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle
Quartet Records, Gruppo Sugar and Cinevox are proud to present an exclusive four disc box set featuring music from the classics films of Michelangelo Antonioni – featuring music by Giovanni Fusco (L’avventura, L’eclisse, Il deserto rosso) and Giorgio Gaslini (La notte). Antonioni: Suoni del Silenzio includes four CDs for four films from the director’s early Italian masterpieces commonly referred to as the “Lack of Communication Cinema.” The series begins with L’avventura, the harrowing tale about a missing woman whose disappearance leads to a new and conflicted romance between her man and her best friend. The music by Giovanni Fusco is a spirited reflection upon the Southern Italian setting, including the breathtaking final shot at Taormina. The collection includes all the original music used in the film, plus several previously unreleased alternate takes.
The tale of womaniser Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello. Giovanni's attempts to woo Donna Anna end in tragedy when he kills her father in a duel. Anna and her fiancé Don Ottavio swear vengeance. Giovanni then attempts to seduce Zerlina at her wedding reception, but is foiled when his former mistress Donna Elvira warns the bride of Giovanni's reputation. Giovanni now has everyone out for his blood, but tries to trick his pursuers by switching places with Leporello. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the Vienna State Opera Chorus and Philarmonic Orchestra performing Mozart's famous opera. The principle singers are Walter Berry, Erna Berger, Otto Edelmann, Anton Dermota, Elisabeth Grummer and Cesare Siepi as Don Giovanni.
Hitherto unpublished works by the very popular late seventeenth- / early eighteenth- century Italian composers Alessandro Scarlatti and Giovanni Bononcini - that's what Soprano Amaryllis Dieltiens and her continuo partner Bart Naessens found in the Brussels collection of François-Joseph Fétis, who was a famous musicologist in the nineteenth century. With their ensemble Capriola di Gioia they present many of these pieces recorded here for the first time ever. The quality of the compositions is on a par with those already known - an irresistible pleasure for friends of secular Baroque cantatas! Soprano Amaryllis Dieltiens has been acclaimed particularly by connoisseurs of Baroque singing.
The senses reign, and Reason now is dead (Petrarch). Giovanni Antonini, flautist and founder of the legendary Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, enjoys musical voyages, the discursiveness of music. He begins with an anonymous 16th century pavane, La Morte della Ragione (The Death of Reason), which he believes refers to In Praise of Folly, in which its author Erasmus distinguishes between two forms of madness: a sweet illusion of the spirit, and a negative form, one that the vengeful Furies conjure up from hell…