Luca Longbardi

Sometimes fate steps in and changes the course of a life. That’s what happened to Luca Aquino: he was about to go on a “Jazz-Bike-Tour” in the summer of 2017. He’d packed his trumpet and was ready to set off…but then he couldn’t. He had contracted Bell’s palsy, a sudden and acute facial nerve paralysis which put paid to his idea of cycling all the way from his home town of Benevento to Oslo, playing concerts en route. He couldn’t touch the trumpet for more than a year, then had to re-learn it more or less from scratch. The good news is that he has successfully put his musical career back on track.

Luca N. Stradivari (1993) is a composer and pianist of his own music. After he graduated at the University of Nottingham, he started to hold composition seminars and concerts in China since 2018. He writes: “The first part of this release is marked by the performance of The King is Dead – shipwreck for violin and piano. A reworking case for duet – Luca N. Stradivari on the piano and Luca Fanfoni on the violin – of the concert for wind orchestra and violin solo based on the First World War, performed in 2012 in Salò on lake Garda for its annual music festival.

In this recording Luca Pianca explores the enchanting world of 17th-century French music. He introduces the listener to the unique and refined musical style of the Grand Siècle, where the lute and theorbo reigned supreme.

Between 1680 and 1728, Marin Marais brought the pièce de viole to the peak of perfection. An unremitting’ teacher, he was also the publisher of his own music and invented special signs to notate certain ornaments for the viol. In the course of his research at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Italian gambist Vittorio Ghielmi studied these manuscript codes, in the hand of Marais himself or his direct students. ‘This led me to a new vision of French Baroque music, which applies not only to the viola da gamba, but also to vocal and orchestral music. These signs reveal the technique of playing in action. Contrary to the static descriptions of the treatises of the time, one has the impression of seeing didactic “videos”.’