Sonya Yoncheva / Cappella Mediterranea REBIRTH

 

REBIRTH

 

Heidi Maria Taubert / Instrumenta Musica / Ercole Nisini PASSACAGLIE D'AMORE

 

PASSACAGLIE D'AMORE

Marco Beasley / Constantinople / Kiya Tabassian LA PORTA D'ORIENTE

LA PORTA D'ORIENTE

Silvia Frigato / Accademia d’Arcadia / Alessandra Rossi Lürig ET MANCHI PIETÀ

Inspired by the work of painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome 1593Naples ca. 1656), this release aims to explore features of both paintings and music of the early Italian Baroque, highlighting their creative features and their emotional foundations. Daughter of Orazio Gentileschi (one of the rst Italian Caravaggesque painters) Artemisia was, until a few decades ago, remembered chiey for the scandal of the rape trial she brought against Agostino Tassi, one of her fathers artistic partners, who abused her when she was 17. She had to wait over 300 years to see her value as a painter fully recognised. The music is performed by Accademia d'Arcadia, an ensemble comprising 13 musicians playing period instruments and a singer. The CD contains a 28 page, full colour booklet featuring 3 of Artemisias most famous paintings, detailed infos and texts, together with detailed background information, resulting in a concept that is both interesting and affecting.

Emőke Baráth, Il Pomo d'Oro, Francesco Corti VOGLIO CANTAR

The Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) was probably the most remarkable, talented, famous and successful woman of her times in the field of music. In 2019 we will celebrate its 400th anniversary with a new program performed by soprano Emöke Baráth under the direction of Francesco Corti.

The album, Voglio Cantar, present some of her most beautiful compositions for soprano, some works by her teacher Francesco Cavalli, and a delightful variety of contemporary instrumental pieces.

Barbara Strozzi grew up in a household frequented by illustrious intellectuals. In the year 1637 her father founded an academy exclusively focused on music, the ‚accademia degli unisoni’ – which was not only hosted and presided over by Barbara, but also became her stage to perform her own music. She received her musical education from Francesco Cavalli, who then worked in various important musical positions in Venice and was about to launch his career as an opera composer.

Barbara Strozzi published a significant number of music: 8 volumes of madrigals, arias, ariettas, canzoni – including one volume of sacred music. Most of the compositions are focused on the soprano voice, displaying its pure beauty in lyrical melodies. The only painted (supposed) portrait of Barbara Strozzi shows her as a musician in quite a lascivious pose, presenting the then typical association of female musician and courtesan. Barbara Strozzi died in Padova in the year 1677 under unknown circumstances.

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)

Roberta Mameli / Luca Pianca ANIME AMANTI

A voice, a lute, a sigh. Nothing could be simpler and more immemorial. This expression of sentiments and emotions, of the intermittencies of the heart and the shadows of the soul, is of course as old as the world. Yet it was truly a reconquest of the Renaissance. With Caccini, the ‘new music’ at once found a miraculous melodist. He composed a Euridice, performed in 1602, two years after Jacopo Peri’s setting and five years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo. The Renaissance did not know opera, but long secreted that genre soon to be born. And it is brand-new opera that opens and closes this recording, through the voice of its first visionary, Claudio Monteverdi. His Lamento d’Arianna, the centrepiece of a lost work, expresses sorrow, regrets, revolt through the very music of the Italian language, here brought to white heat. The ‘new music’ spread throughout Italy: Merula in Cremona, Falconieri in Naples, and Barbara Strozzi, the most famous woman composer of the age, in Venice.

The Italian soprano Roberta Mameli is a great lover of this music, which she performs with an outstanding feeling for words and drama. Luca Pianca offers her his artistry and his great experience. Roberta Mameli is joining Alpha for several recordings, which will guide us towards other rarities and other periods. (LQM)

Ruby Hughes / Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann / Jonas Nordberg HEROINES OF LOVE AND LOSS

The women appearing before our ears throughout this programme range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare’s Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines – the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 – 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on the suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world – Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes ‘the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant’, to quote Monteverdi’s brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann – who also contribute instrumental solos – she here revels in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by the combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.

Simone Kermes / Enrico Casazza / La Magnifica Comunità LOVE

A collection of beautiful baroque and renaissance love songs that reflect the versatility of love – passionate, dramatic and addictive by the most popular composers of this time, from Monteverdi, Purcell, Cesti to Merula and Dowland.

Love is Simone Kermes’ most intimate and personal album yet.

The arrangement, cast of instruments, and recording set up is as such that the “pop song” quality, the contemporary and eternal spirit, the immediacy of these compositions is revealed. All sung with the unique legato, pure, and silver quality that makes Simone Kermes’ voice so special.

Simone Kermes is a dramatic coloratura soprano and multi-award winner. For her solo albums she has received a number of international awards, such as the annual award of the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik, the Echo Klassik award for 2011 Female Singer of the Year, the Diapason d`Or, Midem Award, Choc Le Monde de la Musique and Gramophone magazine’s Recording of the Month. In April 2013 she received one of Russia’s highest cultural awards, the Golden Mask, for her performances as Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Tchaikovsky State Academic Theatre in Perm.

Opera performances have taken her as Konstanze, the Queen of the Night, Fiordiligi, Donna Anna, Giunia, Rosalinde, Lucia, Gilda, Ann Truelove, Alcina and Laodice, among other roles, to New York, Paris, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Moscow, Beijing and German state opera houses. (Presto Classical)

More Hispano / Vicente Parrilla YR A OYDO

Yr a oydo is an old Spanish expression for "going by heart" and is the name of MORE HISPANO's latest innovative project lead by the recorder player Vicente Parrilla. The young Spanish Ensemble presents Ancient Music of early 17th century Spain and Italy, completely improvised but not without cherishing the skills of historic performance - a goal that is as ambitious as it is unique.

MORE HISPANO holds ideal qualifications for this kind of music: the musicians have been in the business for many years, some of them performing together since childhood. Most have since come to belong to the best and most innovative specialists of their generation in Ancient Music in Spain. They perform solely on historic instruments and artful replica of instruments that were in use in the 17th century. The soprano Raquel Andueza not only performs with MORE HISPANO but also with a variety of internationally renowned ensembles and projects, among them L'Arpeggiata under Christina Pluhar.

This recording is the outcome of the musicians' experimentation and struggle with the historical standards, of their longstanding shared performances, and the playful interaction with their instruments, peer musicians and not least themselves. The aim therein was not to gain distance from the original historic compositions but an intense and often very personal involvement with those works which frequently leads to surprising results.

The record at hand stands in the tradition of the practice of improvisation: not one piece was played twice in equal manner, no solo was predictable, no one knew at the beginning of a piece when or how it would end.

As a result, the track titles are not work titles as such, but much rather hint at the structure of the piece (e.g. "Passacaglia" as a form of dance), or suggest the employed compositions (e.g. "Guardame las vacas"). In many ways, the style of making music here relates to Jazz, and oftentimes the inherent and uncompromising quest for emotion and expression will be more familiar to the fan of Jazz than it might be to the admirer of Ancient Music. It is this gap in today's musical landscape that Yr a oydo aspires to bridge. (Carpe Diem Records)

Romina Basso / Latinitas Nostra LAMENTO

Romina Basso's new album examines the 17th-century Italian lamento, a chamber cantata on an ostensibly tragic subject that is capable of embracing wider territory than a formal outpouring of grief. The prototype was Monteverdi's psychological work Lamento d'Arianna, drawn from a now lost opera of 1608. For his successors, however, the form had political potential. Carìssimi's Lamento in Morte di Maria Stuarda makes Counter-Reformation hagiography out of Mary, Queen of Scots, while Rossi's Lamento della Regina di Svezia mourns the death of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, killed in battle in 1632. The genre wasn't necessarily serious, either. Francesco Provenzale's Squarciato Appena Avea, for example, takes the Gustavus Adolphus story as point of departure for a scabrous study of his widow's sexuality. Among the greatest of all baroque interpreters, Basso is breathtakingly expressive and persuasive. The Greek period ensemble Latinitas Nostra is directed from the harpsichord by founder Markellos Chryssicos. Exceptional. (The Guardian.com)