Umberto Brunelleschi

Italian pop singer Umberto Tozzi began singing at a very young age, joining a band called Off Sound in 1968 and later teaming up with Adriano Pappalardo. "Un Corpo un 'Anima" became his first hit in 1974, and he recorded his debut album, Donna Amante Mia, in 1976. Ti Amo followed in 1977, and the successful Tu was released in 1978. Tozzi's breakthrough came a year later when he climbed the Italian and Latin American charts with "Gloria," a song covered by Laura Branigan on her 1982 self-titled debut record.

The plot of La cambiale di matrimonie, which Rossini composed when he was just eighteen years old, revolves around the farcical attempts of Tobia Mill, a rich English merchant, to combine business with pleasure by forcing this daughter, the lovely Fanny (“the merchandise”) to marry Slook, his rich colonial correspondent from America, by means of a bill of exchange. Eventually, it is the gallant Slook himself who persuades Mill to allow Fanny to marry her true love, Edoardo Milfort. This Rossini Opera Festival—Pesaro production features two well-established singers, Désirée Rancatore and Saimir Pirgu, who are joined by three promising young singers: Fabio Maria Capitanucci, Enrico Maria Marabellie and Maria Gortsevskaya.

L’Equivoco stravagante (the curious misunderstanding) was Rossini’s first attempt at writing a two act opera. The plot is based around three characters; Ermanno, Ernestina and Buralicchio. Ermanno, who’s young and poor, loves Ernestina the daughter of Gamberotto, a wealthy farmer. However, Ernestina and her father have their eyes on Buralicchio, a young upstart who has more money than sense. To get his competition out of the way, Ermanno and a few servants hatch a plot to convince Buralicchio that Ernestina is actually a castrato, and worse, an army deserter. Ernestina is arrested, but eventually freed by Ermanno whom she then marries.

Sandro Fuga was born in 1906 in Mogliano Veneto in the province of Treviso, but was Torinese by adoption. He studied piano under the guidance of Luigi Gallino; studied organ with Ulisse Matthey; and studied composition with Luigi Perrachio, Franco Alfano, and Giorgio Federico Ghedini. A cultured, elegant, and lovable artistic figure from a subalpine aristocratic background, Fuga was a refined and sensitive pianist, as well as a teacher of the highest caliber. He was a musician who made his own aesthetic belief and remained unscathed within the barrenness of the sterile shadows of a certain avantgarde, destined to grow old within l’espace d’un matin. Umberto Aleandri and Filippo Farinelli here are introducing us to the work including the three sonatas for cello and piano (two of which are world premiere recordings), clear emblem of the compositional ability of the author, teeming with pleasant and various writing solutions always elaborated with consummate skill and filtered by a great knowledge of the past tradition.

Starting from our common passion for Italian instrumental music of the early twentieth century, we, Chiara Burattini and Umberto Jacopo Laureti, declare that we have composed a picture (as varied as possible) around the two key figures of the world of piano (Busoni) and cello (Mainardi) of the time. From the Kultaselle variations (a youthful page, dense and full of passion) and from Busoni's seraphic Albumblatt, we passed through the Art Nouveau drawings of the Wolf-Ferrari Sonata and the Two Album Pages of Alaleona, ending with the Malipiero Sonatines and by Mainardi (the latter, together with the songs by Alaleona, in the very first recording).