Lucia Casagrande Raffi in Italy, Lucia at the age of three and a half already shows a certain predisposition for music and in particular singing.At the Conservatorio “F. Morlacchi” in Perugia Lucia at a young age completes the main part of her musical studies first with a diploma in singing and then, awarded with full marks, in Music Didactics. Dedicating herself to teaching for the next few years she meets within the Conservatorio many important musical figures such as the pedagogue A. M. Freschi, the musicologist R. Meucci and the composer F. De Rossi Re, personalities that culturally and musically greatly influence her. Alongside teaching Lucia continues to develop her creative-interpretive side of music discovering contemporary idioms and subsequently the possibility to tackle through the voice various expressive genres.

The struggle between momentary inspiration and the great Forms’ moral needs cost Schumann, in time, a fall into darkness. His mind, inhabited by voices, built more and more monuments to Forms which were already fossils by his time, such as the Sonata, Symphony, or Oratorio. His impulsive nature (surprised, in turn, by the continual flow of themes arising from mysterious, and at times sinister, skies) was forced into a discipline whose destiny was to justify the genius, to redeem it from its sources earned by work alone. He had the self-taught man’s shame for the easiness of his inventions. In his Hausmusik, the pieces he wrote for amateurs and for domestic use, his neurosis and his constant need for academic recognition found rest against the destructive spur etching his mind.

Niels Wilhelm Gade from Copenhagen was more popular than Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Bruckner during his lifetime. Between 1850 and 1890 his fourth symphony was the most performed symphony by a living composer worldwide.
Schumann and Mendelssohn valued the young colleague who came to Leipzig in 1843 on a grant. Mendelssohn conducted several world premieres.

Napoléon Coste was born on the 27th of June 1805 in Amondans in the department of Doubs in eastern France, a date that was not established until 1982. He grew up in the neighbourhood of Ornans, to which he later dedicated several compositions. In 1813 he was in the Dutch town of Delfzijl with his father, a captain in the French army, he passed the Zuiderzee and crossed the river Rhine. The memory of these places returned in his compositions, the Souvenirs. He started his career as a guitarist in 1826 in Valenciennes, where he lived as a youth, began to compose, and played in a concert with the travelling virtuoso Sagrini. At the end of 1828 he settled in Paris, where he stayed for almost the rest of his artistic career. There, in the centre of important musical developments, he joined the circles of musicians who originated from Valenciennes, and also of famous guitarists, among whom Sor became of great importance to him, as he studied harmony and counterpoint with him and became his friend, joining him in concerts. His life in Paris is expressed in several programmatic compositions, after Berlioz’ invention of musical drama.

A reed trio combines three instruments whose timbre is similar but subtly different; this encourages gifted composers – and particularly those with a penchant for timbral finesses – to explore the variety of nuances it can produce. In this ensemble, the three woodwinds’ interaction highlights their kinship as well as their unique personalities. They have in common the variety of sound, ranging from deep expressiveness to agility and virtuosity; in consequence, this ensemble expresses both an ironic, playful and good-humoured style, and one characterized by lyricism. At the same time, this ensemble requires great skill of the composer, given the absolute transparency of the counterpoint it produces.
All of these qualities – mastery of the compositional techniques, irony, agility, clarity, expressiveness, timbral exploration – are typical for all composers recorded in this programme, which offers us a fascinating itinerary through the output of French music for reed Trio in the twentieth century.

The definition of a perimeter of coherence for a recording or concert programme is rightly given special attention by performers. From the didactic choice of recording the opera omnia of an author, to that of identifying a formal, rather than a historical or poetic connection, the choices are innumerable and a priori unquestionable. However, I would like to emphasise how the idea pursued by Andrea Corongiu, in this his second volume dedicated to guitar sonatas of Mediterranean inspiration, has an intrinsic strength: the selection of the pieces proposed moves at the same time from formal and poetic criteria, ensuring that coherence and heterogeneity that are a sure reason for the listener’s interest. This second part of Corongiu’s research moves on from what was left undone in the first volume of 2019: if there, in fact, Angelo Gilardino’s Sonata del Guadalquivir closed the programme, offering the listener an innovative exploration of Mediterranean themes, here the first part of the recital is entirely dedicated to the composer from Asigliano, who passed away at the beginning of 2022, and to two composers who have taken up some elements of his invaluable human and artistic legacy in a different and personal way: Cristiano Porqueddu and Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart.

Bach is to the history of Western music as Dante and Shakespeare are to western literature. Outstanding musical figure, with endless creative and communicative powers, he expresses and summarizes all the musical experiences of the late Renaissance and the Baroque, taking them to unequalled heights. He had an unfailing taste in synthesizing the most diverse styles and in restoring the strength of seemingly outdated forms, and an impressive capacity of structuring the musical discourse. Bach works out a new way of thinking in music, that becomes a foundational element of the European musical thought in the two successive centuries.

Francesco Molmenti è un chitarrista, didatta e storico della musica.

This double CD offers us an extraordinary glimpse into Mozart’s pianism and the evolution of his creative style. Indeed, when discussing Mozart, a risk frequently comes to the fore. Given the very short span of his earthly life, the precocity of his talent and comparative maturity of his early works, one might gather the false impression that Mozart underwent no real stylistic evolution. Whilst Beethoven’s “three periods” are so trite a commonplace of musicology that many advocate a new approach to the periodisation of Beethoven’s style, in Mozart’s case the boundaries are hardly defined, and those unfamiliar with the finesses of his oeuvre might easily consider his output as a unified whole.

While still a student, Richter won first prize at the All-Union Contest of Performers of 1945. His playing earned him considerable renown, and by the time of his graduation in 1947 he had devoted fans. In 1949 he garnered the coveted Stalin Prize. Richter gave the 1942 premiere of Sergey Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 6 – the composer's first work in that form for years, and the first one he did not premiere himself.

Chamber music with guitar of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was written almost exclusively by composers who were also guitarists too. They developed guitar technique while framing the guitar within ensembles with wind or strin instruments in order to enhance its expressive features. As a matter of fact, numerous Methods for guitar playing were created in this period. They were conceived for the professional players or amateurs. In parallel, the repertoire increased to the point that publisher issued more pieces for guitar than for other instruments. This fact impacts on the development of chamber music with guitar in many different ensembles such as duo, trio, quartet and quintet, and even guitar concertos with the orchestra.

Debussy’s “Iberism” was made to glide, in the fashion of a synecdoche, towards a clear and declared “Guitarism”. However, the Frenchman’s explicit citations of and allusions to the guitar would suffice to support such theses. If Segovia’s most cherished vision saw the guitar as a “miniature orchestra”, Debussy overturned it. In some cases, he treated the orchestra itself as a “great guitar”. In Matin d’un jour de fête, from Ibéria, he makes his request of imitation explicit, through the indication of “quasi chitarra” asking the violinists to hold the instrument under their arms. The same premise applies to the articulation and interpretation of the piano prelude La sérénade interrompue.

Jean-Sébastien Bach (1685-1750) : Variations Goldberg BWV 988

FRANCESCA TORELLI was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy. After earning a degree in lute with the highest marks at the Conservatory of Verona, she completed her studies with Nigel North at the Guildhall School of Music in London. At the same time, she studied renaissance and baroque singing with Auriol Kimber.From the beginning, her concert activities have featured the repertoires for voice and lute (singing while accompanying herself on the instrument), as well as the solo repertoire for lute and theorbo and basso continuo.As a soloist, she has participated in numerous festivals in Europe, South America and Australia.She has provided and played the music for various theatrical productions and has appeared as a lutenist on television programs for RAI 2, Channel 4, and others. She has also recorded for the national Italian radio (RAI Radiotre) and for other radio networks throughout Europe.

All of the Estudios sencillos represent, in a few lines of music, the stylistic evolution of Leo Brouwer throughout his compositional itinerary. The first series of ten pieces, conceived as a pedagogical study of particular difficulties, was written in 1971 and still embodies the Cuban influences of the early Brouwer. Starting with the very first, which had been largely sketched in the early Sixties, and in which the study of syncopations against a bass is joined to a typical South-American rhythm, all of the Studies focus on the challenges which the students may face when confronting a style markedly different from that of the simple tunes or regular arpeggios found in the teaching methods hitherto used – and which dated back from the early nineteenth century; this does not apply, of course, to the concert etudes written for the professional performers.