Luca Fontana

There is always poetry as well as virtuosity coursing through Enrico Gatti’s violin playing, and nowhere more so than when he turns to Italian early Baroque music, as here in Mille consigli with his Ensemble Aurora: the album title reflecting the multiplicity of emotional ideas and colours possible in violin music from this time (Gatti’s earlier recordings of similar music have recently been re-released by Glossa as L’arte del violino in Italia).

2 CDs, 40 tracks including hits from Eros Ramazzotti, Umberto Tozzi, Lucio Dalla, Jovanotti and many others.

Espousing the cause of the Institute for the Musical Heritage of Piedmont, over a ten-year period Opus 111 are issuing 50 discs of “Treasures of Piedmont”, mostly first recordings. The Academia Montis Regalis under Luigi Mangiocavallo has already opened our eyes and ears to orchestral music by Pugnani (10/96), perhaps the greatest violinist of his time. Now the same forces offer something well off the beaten track and only recently brought to light – a “musical translation” of Goethe’s novel Werther, which had been published a couple of decades previously. (The Baker-Slonimsky Dictionary, exceptionally, is totally wrong about this work.)