Marco Castello

Some of the connections with Venice may be a little tenuous, and this particular Winged Lion even circles over Spain clutching a Venetian guitar. The Palladian Ensemble's debut disc was called An Excess of Pleasure; the sequal offers nothing less! From two gutsy Vivaldi concertos via the dashing caprice of Santiago de Murcia's La Jota to a canzon by Cavalli which discharges itself in a haunting echo of Monteverdi's Lamento della Ninfa, the programme continually surprises and enchants. The playing too.

The new recording by recorder player Dorothee Oberlinger with violinist and countertenor Dmitry Sinkovsky shows the musical turn of time from the Renaissance to the Baroque in a kaleidoscope of newly conceived, experimental declamatory music by Italian masters, who for the first time expressed passions such as love and hate, grief and joy, astonishment and longing in music to the fullest.

Il Giardino Armonico, founded in Milan in 1985, brings together a number of graduates from some of Europe’s leading colleges of music, all of whom have specialised in playing on period instruments. Many of its members are also in demand as international soloists and have appeared in concert with such eminent artists as N. Harnoncourt, G. Leonhardt, T. Pinnock, Ch. Coin and J. Savall. The ensemble’s repertory is concentrated in the main on the 17th and 18th centuries. Depending on the demands of each programme, the group will consist of anything from 3 to 30 musicians…

Collection The Heritage of Monteverdi Whether they played violin, cornet, harpsichord or theorbo, Italian musicians of great renown called Buonamente, Castello, Pesenti and Ferro crossed the Alps to take up much-coveted posts at the courts of Emperors Ferdinand I and II. Their splendid music surged forth, blending the blaze of the brass with the sweetness of the strings in an unceasing tourney of virtuosity and emotions depicted in sound. A major rediscovery of this music as an instrumental prelude to the first madrigal of Monteverdis 8th Book, which ends this new recording of La Fenice.

Venice, 1625: the city of the doges is one of the principal artistic centres of Europe. At the Cappella San Marco, a profoundly original style of instrumental music is in the process of discarding all reference to the tradition of vocal polyphony.The era of Baroque stravaganze has begun! Now, in the hands of a supreme master of the recorder, this ultra-virtuosic art acquires a new lease of life. Maurice Steger is one of the leading artistic personalities of his generation. He is a frequent guest soloist with leading Baroque ensembles such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Musica Antiqua Köln, the English Concert, Europa Galante and I Barocchisti.

Fresh from winning the Instrumental category in the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2014 for “Guardian Angel” (CCSSA35513) Rachel Podger is back with this beautiful collection of masterpieces of the early Italian Baroque. By the mid-seventeenth century, musical composition had reached a point where invention had converged with technical mastery. Composers embraced a bass line lively with linearity, often entering into dialogue with the upper voices. Exploratory harmonic schemes were encompassed within larger unified tonalities. Through rhetorical structures, such as motive, imitation and sequence, composers instilled logic into their musical arguments.

In their survey of the trio sonata, London Baroque has already visited France, England and Germany and now arrives at the birthplace of the genre – Italy in the 17th Century. In this period, instrumental music was becoming important in its own right, and soon the violin was recognized as the ideal vehicle for this new style.

The Decameron series is put together by Colossus magazine and in it, they bring together progressive rock artists from all over the world to make what is usually a multi-disc compilation album, but even by those standards, this four CD set is their most elaborate yet. Look at who is here!

This release is part of an eight-disc series by the small historical-instrument ensemble London Baroque, covering the entire history of the trio sonata in four countries (Italy, Germany, France, and England) over two centuries (17th and 18th). The series is more aimed at those with a strong interest in Baroque instrumental music than at general listeners, but several of them have been attractive for anyone, and this album falls into that group. It might well have come first in a chronological series, for it includes the very first works that might be called trio sonatas, the Sonata a tre of Giovanni Cima, published in 1610, and the Sonata a tre secuondo tono, from 1621.