Ars Antiqua Austria / Gunar Letzbor JOHANN JOSEPH FUX Gesú Cristo negato da Pietro

 

GESÚ CRISTO NEGATO DA PIETRO

 

Vox Luminis /Freiburger Barockconsort / Lionel Meunier BIBER Requiem

 

REQUIEM

 

Il Giardino d’Amore THE HEART OF EUROPE

The Heart of Europe – Corona Regni Poloniae – 1500 – 1750 is a new CD lanced by Ëvoe Records.
Main goal of this album is to present rare music of Central Europe during 250 years of late Renaissance and Baroque era, especially focusing on the cultural exchange between Ottoman Turkey and Occidental Europe. In this context Poland (in latin Corona Regni Poloniae) is presented as The Heart of Europe being culturally linked with those different worlds. The topic of the CD concentrates around the date of the biggest battles between christianity and islam which took place in Vienna in 1683.

Fascinating personality and key person in this story is Wojciech Bobowski – (in Turkey called Ali Ufki ) who represented both cultures and connected their music. The other interesting composers appearing in this album are Johannes de Lublin, Gorczycki, Zielenski, Mielczewski, Klosseman. You can listen also to great Battalia by Biber, and Turcaria by Fux in new exciting arrangements with much bigger instrumentation. The salt and pepper of this CD is of course instruments typical for ottoman culture such as ney or santur.

The CD is recorded by Il Giardino d’Amore orchestra and choir in cooperation with Tempus and Trombastic Ensembles.
The diversity of genres and the compositions of the CD is a great advantage blending smoothly sacred and secular music with popular and court dances.

We would like to encourage our listeners to explore more about this fascinating music and history. We hope that curiosity will bring new discoveries and new presentations soon. The CD is an incredible adventure for the musicologists, music lovers, and great fun for the whole families with young members, especially enjoying the dynamic rhythms, and original colorful melodies of past times and kingdoms.

L'Arpeggiata / Christina Pluhar VÊPRES SOUS CHARLES VI À VIENNE

None of these works have been previously recorded, and most of them come from manuscripts that were discovered by Pierre Cao in the libraries of Kromeriz (Czech republic) and Vienna.

Meret Lüthi / Les Passions de l’Ame SCHABERNACK - A Treasure Trove of Musical Jokes

Swiss violinist Meret Lüthi is artistic director and concertmaster of the baroque orchestra «Les Passions de l’Ame», which she co-founded in 2008. She was a guest musician with the Freiburger Barockorchester and has worked as a concertmaster in the Belgian ensemble «B’Rock». She has also taught at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. She has participated in CD recordings, opera productions, concert tours and radio and television broadcasts with René Jacobs, Ivor Bolton, Adam Fischer and Gary Cooper, among others. In addition, Meret Lüthi is deeply dedicated to chamber music: at the «Young Artists in Concert» festival in Davos, she was featured in a variety of programs; in 2010, she made her debut at the Lucerne Festival. 

Meret Lüthi completed her violin studies at the Bern University of the Arts with distinction, having been taught by Monika Urbaniak-Lisik and Eva Zurbrügg. She studied with Walter Levin as a member of the Amaryllis Quartet, before specializing in baroque violin under the tutelage of Anton Steck at the State Academy of Music in Trossingen, Germany. Her talent was recognized at master classes with Igor Ozim, Christian Altenburger, Thomas Brandis, Ingolf Turban and Gerhard Schulz. Meret Lüthi was awarded scholarships from the Kiefer Halblitzel Foundation and the Kiwanis Club of Bern; in 2007 she was a prizewinner in the German University Competition for Early Music. 

As a specialist in historically-informed performance practice, Meret Lüthi works as an orchestra coach and is regularly invited to share her expertise in radio broadcasts produced by Swiss Radio SRF 2 Kultur. She is a lecturer of baroque violin at the Bern University of the Arts. 

Nuria Rial / Artemandoline SOSPIRI D'AMANTI

With their ensemble Artemandoline, formed in 2001, Juan Carlos Muñoz and Mari Fe Pavón chose to go back to the original documents in order to the establish the true pedigree of this incomparable family of instruments. They have made a major contribution to launching a movement to encourage musical freshness and rigour. A better understanding of the compositions, closer study of the early treatises, the playing styles, the musical environment of the glorious era of the mandolin, leads to better appreciation of Baroque music, which itself became over time a mode of thought and action.

Searching for early mandolins, working on the manuscripts, hunting down early treatises, exploring the iconography: these are the means by which, for more than ten years now, the musicians of Artemandoline have sought to do fuller justice to the works of Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Weiss, and their contemporaries. The success of this approach based on a return to the sources, which constitutes the most important development in the history of the interpretation of ‘serious’ music in the course of the twentieth century, has been made possible by the cooperation of many protagonists – musicians, but also concert organisers, recording producers, publishers, musicologists, and instrument makers. 

To ensure that music composed in the past does not sound like mere ‘early music’ in the present, the performers must manage to be sufficiently free, spontaneous, anticipative and astonished in their intimate act of creation and the newness it engenders. Juan Carlos Muñoz and Mari Fe Pavón spend their lives searching out and reviving forgotten masterpieces of the mandolin repertory. They are not content with simply presenting their finds like ‘musical archaeologists’, but endeavour to transmit them to the wider public by means of the essential act of communication between interpreters, composers, and listeners.