Guadalupe López-Íñiguez released her debut album with the complete cello works by Gabrielli and Scarlatti, performed on period instruments, in 2017. The record got great reviews around the world. Now López-Íñiguez has got Olga Andryushchenko as a partner for Mendelssohn’s works for cello and piano. With this setup recording has a unique sound and warm feeling. Both musicians are playing with great old instruments. Olga is playing a piano Érard (Paris, 1862), serial number 32602, and Guadalupe performs on a cello by Claude Pieray (Paris, 1725).

Thibault Noally and Les Accents present a celebration of the Venetian Sonata. The term sonata was first coined at the end of the 16th century by Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli but it was Tartini, born and active in the Venetian Republic, who created some 200 sonatas for violin, the largest body of work in the form, followed by Vivaldi with 80. If Vivaldi borrowed from all an sundry [Caldara, Corelli, Matteis, Bonporti, Albinoni] then others were quick to borrow from him too and the Venetian sonata spread through competing musicians to Germany, via Pisendel and the Dresden court; France with Leclair and Guignone; and Russia with the Venetians Madonis and Dall'Oglio. Thibault Noally is a recognised name on the international baroque stage. He best-known as the solo violin of Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble with Marc Minkowski, with the Concerto Köln, Pulcinella or the Ensemble Matheus.

"Bach - Sonatas" is the fourth recording in Kåre Nordstoga's series of Bach's complete organ works. The main works on this double-CD are the six "Trio Sonatas".

ohann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708-1763), was born in Silesia (then under Austria, but Prussia from 1742 and now part of Poland) and followed a normal career path for a musician in Mitteleuropa, culminating as contraviolonist in the Royal Orchestra of the Court of Prussia from 1736 until his death in 1763. Janitsch also composed ballet music for the Royal Court Opera), rehearsed the opera chorus, and composed music for the balls held at the opera house during carnival-time. Janitsch was also called on to participate in the intimate concerts that took place in the king’s private apartments at Sanssouci, alongside a number of instrumentalist-composers including C.Ph.E. Bach and Johann Joachim Quantz.

Wenzel Raimund Johann Birck (1718-1763) was one of the early proponents of Symphonic music in Vienna, along with Georg Christoph Wagenseil and Georg Matthias Monn, and an early tutor for Mozart. Birck also, along with Georg Christoph Wagenseil tutored a young Joseph Haydn. He was the court organist for Maria Theresia and the music teacher for emperor Joseph II.

The violinist Chiara Zanisi works with the finest early music ensembles, notably the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra under Ton Koopman, with whom she has just finished a long tour performing the Six Brandenburg Concertos. She now devotes her first solo recording to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Sonatas for Harpsichord and Violin. Alongside her is Giulia Nuti, among the most brilliant harpsichordists and scholars in Italy, whose solo CD Les Sauvages: Harpsichords in pre-Revolutionary Paris (DHM) won a Diapason d’Or, among other awards. The kernel from which this project grew is their strongly shared idea that, in addition to great stylistic richness and invention, Bach’s music possesses an aura of magic and an almost divine form.

A delightfull combination of well chosen program materials and expert recording techniques. Sabrina Frey and her companion musicians are top notch performers that serve a concert with well worked ensemble and group interplay.
I found the playing of Sabrina Frey most interesting. She commands her recorder with consumate skill. The works played (including 2 premières) are by Scarlatti, Sieber, Corelli, Valentini, Bononcini, and Marcello. Masters of the baroque form.

Early 18th-century Naples was a flourishing centre for the production of sophisticated instrumental music – a diverse panorama characterized by an extraordinary variety of genres and forms. Naples prided itself on being an important school of repertoire for string instruments, emanating from the city’s conservatories, the foundries of famous masters and virtuoso students. The Neapolitan interest in string instruments was not only reserved to the violin – here represented by a Violin Concerto by Pergolesi –; great importance was also attached to the cello which in the course of the 17th century gradually became a solo instrument, emancipating itself from a mere “basso continuo instrument”.

Whether we call them ‘Mystery’ or ‘Rosary’ Sonatas, these fifteen pieces crowned by a sublime passacaglia for unaccompanied violin form one of the greatest violinistic masterpieces of the Baroque repertory. This version by Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti, derived from a dance project with the Rosas company, leads us into their magical universe through a novel prism: that of movement, to which these pieces are an infinite ode!

In the context of Alessandro Scarlatti’s immense musical production, the recorder repertory certainly plays an important role, the fruit of an interest spanning all the career of the composer which has this instrument as protagonist, both in his many instrumental works and in larger orchestral groups of serenades and musical dramas and in a large production of cantatas with obligatory instruments. This CD proposes cantatas with the soprano voice requiring one or two recorders, besides two sonatas for recorder and basso continuo. It is a homogeneous musical corpus, not by chance almost all contained in two manuscripts preserved in that extraordinary mine of Italian music which is the Santini collection, preserved in the Diözesanbibliothek of Münster, with the exception of the cantata Ardo è ver per te d‚amore, a manuscript copy of which is in the library of the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples.

They consider themselves the oldest tribe of ancient Greece. Their territory is a place from the eternal Golden Age, where peaceful shepherds, unhindered by hard work, can pursue their pleasures and passions. A blissful, perfect country life: Arcadia, the ideal place for ancient mythology, for nymphs and shepherds, heroes and gods. It needn’t worry us that Arcadia was transported from its original location in the heart of the Peloponnese to Sicily in classical Latin literature.

Influenced by César Franck and Widor, Louis Vierne belongs to the French tradition of organists, succeeding the latter at the conservatoire and later becoming organist at Notre Dame. He is an important figure among French organ composers.

Of all the recordings now available of Biber…this [is] by far and away the most spectacular, exuberant, colourful and downright ravishing of them all. Huggett positively revels in the virtuosity of Biber’s original…Huggett’s beautifully crafted performance of the complex and, at times, profoundly moving solo Passacaglia rounds off what is a matchless recording from every perspective.

During his lifetime, Arcangelo Corelli was considered the greatest living composer; his name was known throughout Europe, and his works held up as models by his peers. Corelli’s Op. 3 (12 sonatas for two violins and continuo) – and seven similar but seldom-heard, posthumous sonatas – are performed here by Enrico Gatti, the most authoritative Corelli interpreter.

Nel 1752 per la terza volta, Porpora rivide la capitale dell'Austria.
Vi trascorse diversi anni e fu proprio in quel terzo soggiorno che Haydn lo conobbe e ne ricevette dei consigli. Fu senza dubbio grazie alla generosità dell'ambasciatore di Venezia che Porpora ebbe i mezzi per pubblicare le sue Sonate XII di violino e basso (dedicate a S.A.R. la principessa elettorale di Sassonia Maria Antonia Walpurga di Baviera da Niccolò Porpora maestro di cappella di S.M. il re di Polonia. In Vienna d'Austria, 1754. Si vendono dal signor Frederico Bernardi, libraro della corte imperiale.) Nell'epistola dedicatoria di quest'opera il compositore dice di aver fatto uso dei generi diatonico, cromatico ed enarmonico.