il Trovatoree

For her first solo album on Linn – she has appeared with her Duo Pleyel partner Richard Egarr on three occasions, and more will come! – Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya has taken the bold route of recording the little-known Gottlieb Muffat. Son of Georg Muffat, who most Baroque aficionados will know, Gottlieb attained far greater success in his working life, ultimately being promoted to first organist of the Austrian Habsburg court. In this double album Alexandra has recorded the lavish Componimenti musicali per il cembalo , a collection of seven ‘suites’ that are rich in texture, emotional range and flamboyant decoration. Carefully notated in the magnificent score, the breathtaking ornamentation is there to add expressiveness to the performance. These works represent one of the pinnacles of keyboard music from the mid-eighteenth century, and deserve their place in the repertoire.

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…’ This succession of ‘musical pictures’ leads us to the threshold of the baroque era, starting out with the Puzzle Canon by John Dunstable (1390- ca.1453), whose manuscript is an enigma, via the ‘bizarre’ style of Alexander Agricola (1446- ca.1506) and his obsessive, ostinato rhythm – almost an anticipation of minimalist music…to the improvisatory freedom of the Galliard Battaglia de Scheidt (1587-1654), a battle piece involving a great many diminutions or ‘divisions’, a common technique of improvisation in the Renaissance… This grand instrumental musical fresco of time and space is a kind of self-portrait of Giovanni Antonini and his longstanding musical colleagues.

Giovanni Antonini and his ensemble Il Giardino Armonico celebrate the composer who made them famous: Antonio Vivaldi. Their recordings of The Four Seasons and Cecilia Bartoli's famous first Vivaldi recital left an indelible mark on the discography of the Red-haired Priest! Their musical fireworks display continues with a programme of concertos that is bound to provoke strong reactions, since it is the result of a meeting with a musician who is equally adept at shifting boundaries, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Together they have devised a programme entitled WHAT'S NEXT VIVALDI?, which interweaves ultra-virtuosic concertos by Vivaldi (Il Grosso Mogul RV 208, La Tempesta di Mare (for violin!) RV 253, and RV 157, 191, 550 among others) with, between each concerto, short pieces written by much more recent composers, Luca Francesconi, Simone Movio, Giacinto Scelsi, Aureliano Cattaneo and Giovanni Sollima, and mostly commissioned by Patricia Kopatchinskaja especially for this programme.