I Cavalieri del Cornetto / Andrea Inghisciano / María González TEMPESTA DI PASSAGGI

 

TEMPESTA DI PASSAGGI

 

Les Barocudas / Marie Nadeau Tremblay LA PESTE

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LA PESTE

 

Musica Fiorita / Daniela Dolci DOMENICO ZANATTA Venezia

Little is known about the life of Domenico Zanatta. He was most probably born in Venice as the title pages of his prints seem to attest. The very sparse notices on his early life indicate that he soon started a musical career, already printing his first collection of sonatas at the young age of 24. But he also had a second endeavor: His group of cantatas. Zanatta shows a great mastery of the genre and his melodic inventiveness freely flows between the structuring parts of his cantatas, continuing the tradition of his Venetian colleagues in a much worthy way. Flavio Ferri-Benedetti and Musica Fiorita, under Daniela Dolci, present some of his pieces in between works by Cavalli, Strozzi, who was a pupil of Cavalli, and Fontana, who was a pioneer of the, at the beginning of the 17th century, new stile recitativo. (Arkiv Music)

John Holloway / Lars Ulrik Mortensen / Jane Gower DARIO CASTELLO - GIOVANNI BATTISTA FONTANA Sonate Concertate In Stil Moderno

This collection of pieces from the first generation of Baroque violin music presents almost unknown but highly distinctive and exciting compositions, superbly performed and recorded. The music here was recorded in 2008 and not issued until 2012, perhaps due to ECM's unease over marketing works that even Baroque enthusiasts may not have heard of. These pieces come from Venice, probably during the 1620s. They point the way toward the Baroque duo and trio sonata, still decades in the future, but they're artistically coherent unto themselves. The works of both composers, Dario Castello and Giovanni Battista Fontana, represent a stage in the application of the discoveries of Monteverdi's seconda prattica to independent instrumental music: the lines of the melody instruments have the rhythmic freedom of early opera but are shaped into abstract structures that may be quite startling. Sample the Sonata Nona for fagotto e violino (bassoon and violin) of Fontana (track 5), where the violin is withheld until well into the piece. The relationships among the instruments are constantly changing, and the gorgeous sounds of the instruments used here makes a major contribution: the bassoon of Jane Gower is a dulcian, an immediate ancestor of the modern bassoon, and John Holloway's Baroque violin is a flashing, multi-hued wonder. With superior engineering from ECM in the Propstei St. Gerold (an Austrian mountain monastery beloved by European audiophile engineers), this is a group of highly variegated, dynamic small pieces, a real Baroque find. (James Manheim)

Pamela Thorby / Andrew Lawrence-King GARDEN OF EARLY DELIGHTS

The title’s a play on both Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Jacob van Eyck’s recorder collection The Flute’s Garden of Delights; but more than anything this new disc recalls Herbert’s line “a box where sweets compacted lie”. Straddling the Renaissance and early Baroque, the programme comprises sonatas, sets of divisions and arrangements of songs and popular tunes from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and England. This repertoire proves rich soil for Thorby and Lawrence-King, and the resulting cross-fertilisation of styles and modes of expression with a modern scholarly aesthetic enlivened by two of the keenest musical intelligences in the business results in a most satisfying listening experience. 

Thorby maximises the affective impact of the music through an incredibly varied approach to articulation and phrasing - compare the lively glosses of the delightful opening track, Diego Ortiz’s Recercada segunda de tenore, with the evocative, floating lines of Giovanni Battista Fontana’s Sonata seconda. Lawrence-King is likewise alert to the rhetorical possibilities inherent in both his accompaniments and solos; in the former category, he proves an ideal partner for Thorby in his ability to think vocally, while in the latter his almost visual sense of line and colour is apparent, as in Biagio Marini’s Passacaglio and Dowland’s “Weep you no more”. 

Recorded sound is nothing short of stunning, while the cover image of a hummingbird nicely encapsulates Thorby’s lightness and agility as she darts from piece to piece to extract its nectar. This is Paradise indeed. (William Yeoman)