Lorenzo Chiavini

Bach’s English Suites are entitled in a way that is as strange as it is hard to explain, at least at first glance. Contrary to what one might assume, these works are more closely related to French suites than to English music. The title is taken from the inscription “Fait pour les Anglois”, found on a manuscript owned by Bach's youngest son. In addition to an extensive prelude and four traditional dances – Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue – each suite also contains “gallantries”, lighter dances that were fashionable at the time. In these dance movements, grace and melody play together with a compositional artistry that elevates them far beyond incidental music for courtly dances. After the Partitas published by Passacaille in 2021 (PAS 1105), Lorenzo Ghielmi, one of the most renowned Bach interpreters of our day, now releases the English Suites, recorded on a harpsichord built by Detmar Hungelbert after an instrument by Michael Mietke (ca. 1710 in Berlin).

Scarlatti’s sonatas are among the most original compositions of the Baroque period, bursting with rhythmic and harmonic invention, contrast and colour. Matteo Mela and Lorenzo Micheli take up this exceptional production and record, on two guitars, twelve of his 555 sonatas. Scarlatti was well acquainted with the instrument, which he heard in Spain and Italy, where it permeated his keyboard compositions. By going back to one of Scarlatti’s most obvious and greater musical sources of inspiration, the two performers underline the eloquence and inexhaustible invention of these rhapsodic miniatures, masterpieces of their composer’s art as a colourist.

The catalogue of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works numbers 1128 works, although he actually composed many more than that: a quantity of works have unfortunately not survived to the present day. Some works have also survived in an unfinished form, either because Bach himself did not finish them or because part of the manuscript has been lost. This recording presents all of Bach’s organ works that have survived as fragments; I myself have provided them with completions. Not an easy task, to say the least, but I have tried to adhere to Bach’s style, knowing only too well the impossibility of imitating such a supreme artist. This notwithstanding, it is at least now possible for us to hear and appreciate works that had to a great extent been forgotten.

The Monteverdi contemporary Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) is now unfortunately almost exclusively seen as an important and influential composer of works for keyboard instruments, but he also composed both sacred and secular vocal music throughout his entire creative period.

Those who still think of Wagner’s Tristan as quintessentially erotic music should definitely reconsider: in the list drawn by The Most Erotic Classical Music of All Time, an album with a provocative cover featuring a woman’s derriere and suspenders, in good company with an obvious Bolero and a punctual isottesque finale and a less-obvious Moonlight Sonata or a Good Friday Spell (all by the German from Leipzig), one finds the Centone di Sonate for violin and guitar by Niccolò Paganini (Genoa 1782 – Nice 1840) and precisely with the opening movement of the Sonata in A minor placed in the opening of the present collection.

‘Scacco Matto’ is a continuation of Senni’s distinctive “pointillistic” style - where gated, taut sounds are arranged relentlessly as drumless rhythms and melody, which this time come in more song based structures. On this bold sonic ‘Rave-Voyeuristic’ statement, he takes the synthetic synapse manipulation of Trance and Computer Music, but intentionally encourages short circuits, resulting in unexpected signal paths moving in different directions, and making new fascinating shapes.