La Pifarescha DI GUERRA E DI PACE

Given the prevalence of war in the Europe of the Renaissance it is no real surprise that warlike themes and echoes of battles should find their ways into secular and civic music compositions – or even into religious ones (such as the many L’Homme armé and La Bataille masses of the time). With Di guerra e di pace, La Pifarescha captures the contrast between the roar and rhythms of battle and the celebrations of courtly and popular festivities as would have been performed by an alta cappella ensemble from the Middle Ages through to the dawn of the Baroque: shawms, slide trumpets and sackbuts, plus other wind instruments buttressed by percussion instruments.

The music of well-known composers from the period – Josquin, Isaac, Willaert, Phalèse, Susato and Senfl – is conjured up in virtuosic performances from this Italian ensemble, La Pifarescha, making its first appearance on Glossa (even if its members are regular instrumental contributors to performances and recordings by the likes of Cantica Symphonia or La Venexiana).

This modern journey, creating a Renaissance “soundtrack”, embraces not just war and peace but also the contrast of European and Arabic and Asiatic influences from the times of the Crusades through to civic bands playing for the residents in Renaissance Venice or Bologna. In creating this enjoyable and improvisation-filled entertainment the members of La Pifarescha wear their scholarly knowledge lightly as they play their way from the popular to the erudite and back.

La Pifarescha DI GUERRA E DI PACE

Given the prevalence of war in the Europe of the Renaissance it is no real surprise that warlike themes and echoes of battles should find their ways into secular and civic music compositions – or even into religious ones (such as the many L’Homme armé and La Bataille masses of the time). With Di guerra e di pace, La Pifarescha captures the contrast between the roar and rhythms of battle and the celebrations of courtly and popular festivities as would have been performed by an alta cappella ensemble from the Middle Ages through to the dawn of the Baroque: shawms, slide trumpets and sackbuts, plus other wind instruments buttressed by percussion instruments.

The music of well-known composers from the period – Josquin, Isaac, Willaert, Phalèse, Susato and Senfl – is conjured up in virtuosic performances from this Italian ensemble, La Pifarescha, making its first appearance on Glossa (even if its members are regular instrumental contributors to performances and recordings by the likes of Cantica Symphonia or La Venexiana).

This modern journey, creating a Renaissance “soundtrack”, embraces not just war and peace but also the contrast of European and Arabic and Asiatic influences from the times of the Crusades through to civic bands playing for the residents in Renaissance Venice or Bologna. In creating this enjoyable and improvisation-filled entertainment the members of La Pifarescha wear their scholarly knowledge lightly as they play their way from the popular to the erudite and back.

Allabastrina / La Pifarescha / Elena Sartori FRANCESCA CACCINI La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina

With this production of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina, directed by Elena Sartori, an important stepping-stone in the development of seventeenth-century opera receives a superb new recording from Glossa. For much of her career – Caccini was a composer, a virtuoso singer, a teacher, a poet and a multiinstrumentalist – she worked at the Medici court, and was commissioned by the grand duchess of Tuscany, Maria Maddalena of Austria, to write this commedia in musica for performance in Florence in 1625. Very probably this was the first opera composed by a woman, and its performance in Warsaw in 1628 stands as the first documented Italian opera known to have been staged outside the peninsula.

Caccini’s score, evoking not just the music of her father Giulio but that of Jacopo Peri and of the Monteverdi of Venice, is full of musical diversity and originality. The libretto of La liberazione (by Ferdinando Saracinelli, working from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso) portrays the struggle between two sorceresses – one ‘good’, Melissa, the other ‘evil’, Alcina – over the young knight Ruggiero, who has been bewitched by Alcina.  

The singers recorded here for these roles are Gabriella Martellacci, Elena Biscuola and Mauro Borgioni, whilst other roles – in a score packed with vocal opportunities – are taken by Emanuela Galli, Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli and Raffaele Giordani. Elena Sartori, who directs the ensembles Allabastrina and La Pifarescha, also contributes an illuminating booklet essay placing Francesca Caccini in her musical and biographical context. (GLOSSA)