Prelidio e Fuga in do Maggiore Clavicembalo Ben Temperato

This record production represents for me a kind of “viaticum” towards the return to a complete musical activity, but it is also a farewell to Emilia Fadini, a great musician and musicologist specialized in the study and performance of late Renaissance, Baroque and Classical repertoire, with whom I had the privilege of studying for almost twenty years. The pieces in this recording are the last ones we faced together and I feel like to have to dedicate her this work. This is a way to remember someone who was a teacher, a friend, as well as a solid point of reference and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me as well as for many musicians who, at least in Italy, are actually involved in ancient music.

Early in December 1787 Catherine II of Russia invited the famous composer to her court at St Petersburg where Italian opera was all the rage. A few days after his arrival the wife of the ambassador of Naples and Sicily died and Cimarosa was asked by him to compose a Requiem Mass for the funeral. Composers did not need to bother about being original in those days and Cimarosa could draw easily on a common stock of melodic ideas, but, nevertheless, his Mass is well shaped and certainly not a mere puce d'occasion.