Italiana 2020

Beautifully balanced, marvelously flexible in phrasing and tempo, with much well-judged space in the phrasing. In addition there is lots of variety in the playing style, with many touches of lightness and humour. The recorded quality is also of the best: everything is crystal-clear all the time, though always favoring the often jaw-dropping performances of the Norwegian/English/Croatian lutenist Jadran Duncumb.Listeners are spoilt for choice in this music, but what makes this new recording stand out, apart from the striking excellence of the recorded sound, is the nimble playfulness of Duncumb’s lute playing and the warm Italian sun which Rasi and friends shine upon Dowland’s inspiration.

Beautifully balanced, marvelously flexible in phrasing and tempo, with much well-judged space in the phrasing. In addition there is lots of variety in the playing style, with many touches of lightness and humour. The recorded quality is also of the best: everything is crystal-clear all the time, though always favoring the often jaw-dropping performances of the Norwegian/English/Croatian lutenist Jadran Duncumb.Listeners are spoilt for choice in this music, but what makes this new recording stand out, apart from the striking excellence of the recorded sound, is the nimble playfulness of Duncumb’s lute playing and the warm Italian sun which Rasi and friends shine upon Dowland’s inspiration.

Enjoy this Compilation with the most successful Bar Italia Volume Uno (Musica Italiana per il tuo Lounge Bar) singers like Papik; Alessandro Pitoni, Daniele Luppi and many more!

“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.

The selection of pieces on this album is a collection of original works for viola and guitar by Italian authors who lived between the early nineteenth and the second half of the twentieth century. Written in a galant style, characterized by a formal cleanness, the Duo op. 137 by Carulli is mostly focused on bel canto rather than on motivic development or elaboration. An emphasis on bel canto also characterizes the music of Niccolò Paganini (1782 - 1840). The Sonata for the Grand Viola by Paganini dates back to the Paris period.

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.

Lunedì 30 novembre, in cd, vinile e nei migliori store on line, esce “Confini” il quinto album della band salentina Muffx. Prodotto da Riccardo Rinaldi snc e pubblicato su Black Widow Records con il sostegno di Puglia Sounds Record 2020/2021 della Regione Puglia (FSC 2014/2020 – Patto per la Puglia – Investiamo nel vostro futuro), il disco è quasi interamente registrato live durante un concerto tenuto il 21 agosto, nella strana estate 2020, nell’atrio del Palazzo Belmonte Pignatelli di Galatone, in provincia di Lecce (in collaborazione con l’amministrazione comunale).

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.

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.

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’.