L'esercito Dei 14

Heavily rooted in the romantic tradition of the best Italian progressive rock, Il Paese Dei Balocchi blends beautiful instrumental passages with heavy classical orchestration. This is pure symphonic prog the way it was meant to be played and heard. This album dives from the gentle touch of the softest symphonic prog to a medium tempo jazz influenced atmosphere. Like Banco, PFM and Le Orme, Il Paese Dei Balocchi displays awesome keyboard driven progressive creating the most interesting melodies and warm atmospheres. This album is not unlike a grand epic soundtrack really and offers the listener a deep conceptual atmosphere to get lost in. This album also varied widely from the chimes of a nursery to the deep gothic pillars of a church organ. Outstanding and clever recording.

Following their critically acclaimed recording of Johann Gottfried Müthel’s keyboard concertos (BIS-2179), Polish ensemble Arte dei Suonatori and Marcin Świątkiewicz, who conducts from his instrument, perform the six Hamburg symphonies by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach interspersed with solo fantasias for keyboard. The music of C.P.E. Bach has always been a source of fascination for the listener with its great variety of atmospheres, captivating melodic ideas, irresistible contrasts, surprising interweaving of voices, eccentric harmonies, and extreme dynamic transitions.

Argentinean group Vox Dei started playing by the end of the 1960s. After signing up to independent label Mandioca, the band released "Azucar Amarga" and "Presente" in 1969; a year later, they issued the album Caliente. Vox Dei's conceptual album La Biblia, released in 1971, consolidated the band as one of the major local rock numbers. When Juan Carlos Godoy decided to leave the act, Ignacio Smilari joined in. Soon after Jeremias, Pies De Plomo came out, Vox Dei participated in a movie called Rock Hasta Que Se Ponga El Sol. In 1974, guitarist Carlos Michelini replaced Ricardo Soulé. The group disbanded after a live performance at Buenos Aires' Obras Sanitarias in 1981, returning in 1988 to make a new record called Tengo Razones Para Seguir…

This double album accompanies the eponymous book by Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2023). They are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence.Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano. Our goal in assembling this set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a "virtual" evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance. Through the integration of the contents of the book and the CDs, and leveraging text, image, musical notation, and sound, we offer our listeners the possibility of a fascinating metaphoric time travel.