Paganini 2025

A new recording of Paganini’s eccentric ‘diary of invention’ for guitar by a young Italian musician with a fast-growing reputation in both rock and classical genres.
Giacomo Carletti took up the guitar at the age of 13, initially playing electric. Impressed by his talent, the composer Edoardo Catemario encouraged Carletti to take up the classical guitar. He now makes his career as a busy recitalist with the classical instrument while keeping up his pop and rock connections by playing electric guitar in several bands.
As Carletti remarks in his booklet essay for his debut album on Brilliant Classics, the 43 Ghiribizzi by Paganini stand as a testament to his musical ingenuity and sense of fun. They present a showcase for his technical prowess but also reveal a lighter side to the virtuoso often caricatured as a dark and forbidding figure.

A new recording of Paganini’s eccentric ‘diary of invention’ for guitar by a young Italian musician with a fast-growing reputation in both rock and classical genres.
Giacomo Carletti took up the guitar at the age of 13, initially playing electric. Impressed by his talent, the composer Edoardo Catemario encouraged Carletti to take up the classical guitar. He now makes his career as a busy recitalist with the classical instrument while keeping up his pop and rock connections by playing electric guitar in several bands.

Laura Lootens’s first collaboration with naïve, ‘Diabolico’ leads us into a world of strange tales and pacts with the devil and other ghostly apparitions which actually form the core of a magnificent journey in sound, covering an extremely varied range of styles. A soothingly tranquil introduction, the opening movement of The Devil’s Trill Sonata of Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) here serves as a prelude to the transformations of the last of Paganini's Caprices, the supreme incarnation in music of the devil, composed by George Rochberg (1918–2005).