Nuovo Orione 320

Something new by Haydn? Well, yes and no… None of the works presented on this album has ever been heard in this form in our time. Michael Dücker, director and spiritus rector of nuovo aspetto, has gone in libraries and archives in search of Haydn works that are ideally suited for the chamber music-apart instrumentation of the ensemble nuovo aspetto. Michael Dücker has carefully re-edited the originals and adapted them to today's musical requirements. The result is a fascinating project with amazingly contemporary-sounding chamber music versions of various Haydn works.

The imaginative musician that is harpsichordist Ignacio Prego directs a new selection of the concerti grossi by Charles Avison drawing inspiration from keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. The Madrid-born Prego is alive to the variety of musical ideas embedded in these concertos – four of the concerti grossi “after Scarlatti” that Avison had published in 1744: each concerto, with the ensemble divided into concertino and ripieno groups, is a sequence of movements, the appealing, lively, melodious and playful contrasting with the slow, light, restful and contemplative. Added to Avison’s inventiveness and freshness are Prego and his ensemble’s creativity and sensitivity, especially in matters of ornamentation. Italian music had great popularity in Britain at the time and Avison himself had studied with Francesco Geminiani. Avison also rode the wave of the then-current “English cult of Domenico Scarlatti”, adapting and transforming Scarlatti’s Sonata ideas into his Grand Concertos and making them his own. Ignacio Prego and his new Spain-based ensemble Tiento Nuovo (led by Emmanuel Resche-Caserta) relish the Iberian influences pervading the concertos; these are peppered with folk-music references drawn in by Scarlatti across his more than three decades of travelling around Spain and Portugal with his patron María Bárbara de Braganza. The solo harpsichordist in Prego – Glossa issued a warmly-received set of the Bach Goldberg Variations – is put to stirring use with the inclusion of four Scarlatti keyboard sonatas.

Something new by Haydn? Well, yes and no… None of the works presented on this album has ever been heard in this form in our time. Michael Dücker, director and spiritus rector of nuovo aspetto, has gone in libraries and archives in search of Haydn works that are ideally suited for the chamber music-apart instrumentation of the ensemble nuovo aspetto. Michael Dücker has carefully re-edited the originals and adapted them to today's musical requirements.

When Francesco Bartolomeo Conti came to Vienna in 1701, aged just twenty, he quickly found employment as a theorbo player in the imperial court chapel. His virtuoso skills with the plucked instruments of the time must have been considerable and would have been enough to secure him a good living. But Conti was also a remarkably creative spirit who, on his death in 1732, left behind an impressive quantity of stage works, some of which were widely performed - not least thanks to their original, imaginative instrumentation and their immense variety of expression, ranging from the drastically comic to filigree, vocal-instrumental dialogues and thus encompassing the whole world of "affects".