Italiana 2020

Luciano Pavarotti Cavaliere di Gran Croce was an Italian operatic tenor who also crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most commercially successful tenors of all time. He made numerous recordings of complete operas and individual arias, gaining worldwide fame for the quality of his tone, and eventually established himself as one of the finest tenors of the 20th century, achieving the honorific title “King of the High Cs”.

“In any event, a more convincing case for Krommer, who is also largely forgotten as a symphonist, than the case made with this performance culture could hardly be made.” This is what Pizzicato wrote about the release of Vol. 2 of Krommer’s symphonies. Vol. 3 of this recording series completes the picture of this composer’s quest for harmonic innovations.

Decca Classics is proud to present the new album from Riccardo Chailly and the Filarmonica Della Scala. Released on 20th May 2022, Musa Italiana celebrates the influence of the “Italian style” on three Austro-German composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn.

Following their recording of Bach's Kunst der Fuge, Alberto Rasi and his Accademia Strumentale Italiana take on a new challenge, recording the French masterpiece by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Fifteen years after his Nouvelles Suites de Pieces de Clavecin, Rameau once again turns his attention to an instrumental work, for what will be the last time, inspired by the new potential for chamber music glimpsed in the use of the concertante keyboard. The 1741 collection is the only new work he produced between 1740 and 1744, before returning to the musical theatre to which he will dedicate the rest of his life.

In 1650, the scholar Athanasius Kircher wrote for the first time about a phenomenon that had been familiar to the music world for some time: rhapsodically free instrumental music-making, in which virtuosity is expressively in the foreground and compositional inspirations sometimes disregard the rules of harmony. Kircher called this “stylus phantasticus“. With the development of the monody in Italy around 1600, vocalists initially moved the hearts of the audience, but soon the best instrumentalists emulated them in their own way. The melody instruments swung into their own solo and duo songs, which even today impress in rhetoric and emotionality without words. The listeners at that time were almost in ecstasy, as contemporary reports say. CordArte presents outstanding examples of this new art under the motto "Rapsodia italiana". Here, the violin in particular can make its mark as a new virtuoso instrument. But the viola da gamba also comes into its own, both alone and in dialogue. Last but not least, the harpsichord and organ demonstrate their qualities both as harmonic accompanists and as soloists.

POOH LE CANZONI DELLA NOSTRA STORIA IL PROGETTO DISCOGRAFICO CHE CELEBRA 50 ANNI DI CARRIERA DI UNA DELLE BAND ITALIANE PIÙ AMATE Un cofanetto con 72 successi e materiale mai pubblicato Tra le chicche, l’inedito “Meno male”, provino originale e con un testo totalmente diverso di “Tanta voglia di lei”, il brano con cui iniziava la vera storia del gruppo. “Le canzoni della nostra storia” (Tamata/Sony Music) èil progetto discografico celebrativo dell’incredibile percorso artistico dei Pooh.Il cofanetto saràdisponibile in due versioni, 4 CD e 3 LP, in tutti i negozi e piattaforme digitali dal 20 novembre. “Le canzoni della nostra storia” vuole essere un momento di riconoscimento dell’enorme successo di un gruppo tra i più importanti e amati nella storia della musica italiana, ripercorrendo, attraverso 72 grandi hit ed alcune imperdibili chicche, i cinque decenni di attività della band.

The versatile cellist works since several years as a soloist, first cellist in orchestra and professor for cello. He debuts as a soloist on occasion of the Ravenna festival in 2007 with “Concerto Grosso per tre violoncelli e orchestra” of Krzysztof Penderecki with Enrico Bronzi accompanied from the “orchestra giovanile italiana (OGI)” under the direction of Penderecki. Since that time, he performed numerous concerts in Europe and Asia performing the most important pieces of the cello literature accompanied from different orchestras like “l’Orchestra di Roma e del Lazio”, “Orchestra Cherubini”, “Orchestra Giovanile Italiana”, “Yuvaskula Sinfonia (Finland)”, “Sinfonia Roma”, “Gyeongnam Simphony (Korea)”, “Sinfonieorchester Basel (Switzerland)” and “Hokkaido Young Philarmony (Japan)”.

Sumptuous and spectacular Romantic works by ‘Toscanini’s Organist’.
Pietro Yon (1886-1943) played in what is widely regarded as one of the finest-ever performances of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, conducted at Carnegie Hall in 1935 by Arturo Toscanini. Yon was sharing the stage with the likes of Elizabeth Rethberg and Ezio Pinza; he had acquired a comparable celebrity within the organ world in his lifetime, having emigrated from Italy to the US at the age of 21, and become Organist of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the foremost seat of Catholicism in the US. A New York Times profile portrayed him as an adopted New Yorker who moved in high-society circles and enjoyed ragtime and vaudeville, and he welcomed the likes of Caruso and Toscanini to his home as friends. When he died in 1943, the world-famous conductor numbered among the 1300 mourners at St Patrick’s.Yon’s own music has a post-Romantic, mid-Atlantic flavour reflecting his background without belonging to a single ‘school’.

Rome became an important musical centre during that precious moment of peace between the two world wars, and both of these composers were swept along in feverish activity in the arts during this period. Iditta Parpagliolo matches a refined choice of texts with an equally diverse use of musical language in her songs, from the modal mysticism of La buona parola to the infinite sadness of the Tre canti d’amore. Giovanni Salviucci captures the soul of nature in his Quattro liriche, the twilight classical intimacy of his songs contrasting with the radiant neoclassical style of his Chamber Symphony.

Two traditions coalesce in Casanova e l’Albertolli (1937), the third of the four operas by the Swiss late-Romantic composer Richard Flury (1896–1967): Italian bel canto and the Swiss Festspiel – high art and popular culture. Styled a ‘Commedia lirica’, it invests the comic intrigue onstage with sweeping melodies of Puccinian richness, combining them with choruses based on Ticino folksong – it even has a yodelling chorus – in an engaging hybrid that deserves to be far better known. At the end, of course, evil is banished and love rewarded, but the entire score is dappled with happy inspirations that will bring a smile to the listener’s lips.