Stradivarius

People who are passionate about music will soon have to carry out careful investigations in the ancient districts of the Austrian musical baroque, because these indeed seem to present themselves today as parts of a land rich in forgotten music. But we want to be quite close to them. With this recording we in fact enter again the period of the late 17th and early 18th centuries and our initiative is particularly interesting with regard to the graceful paths of Austrian violinism. Many have already come to love an important author of that time such as the great von Biber (1644-1704) quoted in the previous album (Austrian Baroque for violin solo) with sequence of his Rosary. But then we proceeded to the discovery of Johann Vilsmayr, who endowed us with his crystal-clear music, which rises towards high horizons. Also underlined by the outstanding interpretation of the violinist Liliana Bernardi, in this second release, under the auspices and support of the Associazione Nazionale Italia-Austria. In the present recording we turn to the second part of Vilsmay’s “partite” and of course our interest grows, if we only think of the great surprise stirred up in us by the Salzburg Master on the previous album. After all, to understand him we just dispose of his musical soul, because so little is known about his life. However, there is no wavering: we are confronted with a great musician, who makes use of a pure speech, full of curiosity for life. © Stradivarius

This recording contains Francesco Pennisi’s (Acireale, 11 February 1934 – Rome, 8 October 2000) complete works for solo piano, according to the latest catalogue. The piano compositions have rarely been performed and studied even less frequently, for many reasons. They are concise and liberated at first sight from a serious commitment to composition and open to ‘other’ dimensions compared to his main production, since they unfold playfully, almost with nostalgia. This recording not only has the merit of restoring Pennisi’s piano repertoire to its full entirety for the first time, but it illustrates its due importance in the composer’s active pursuit of an underlying texture of echoes, sounds, and resonances. Pennisi’s piano pieces were composed in the period between the late 50s (Sei pezzi brevi, 1957) and the year 2000 (Na nuttata tanta ranni, un canto natalizio etneo trascritto dalla memoria, 2000). Pennisi is one of the leading exponents of Roman avant-garde music in the period following the Second World War. Initially selftaught, influenced by Dallapiccola’s music, Pennisi moved to Rome to study composition with Robert W. Mann, while attending university. He was one of the founders of the "Nuova Consonanza Association", which is still a reference point for the promotion of new Italian music. Not only was Pennisi a composer, but he was also a graphic artist, painter, set designer and writer. © Stradivarius

The idea for this recording was born at the meeting of two Italian musicians. Ivan Mancinelli, a distinguished percussionist and Domenico Cagnacci, timpanist for the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, celebrate their mutual passion for the music of Ney Rosauro, a top-notch performing artist and composer of international ranking. Rosauro’s catalogue features two absolute “classics”: the Concerto for Marimba No. 1, Op. 34, which originated in 1986, and the Concerto for Timpani, Op. 37, composed in 2003. Mancinelli and Cagnacci came up with the idea of adding another masterpiece to the sizeable catalogue of Rosauro’s compositions for percussion and orchestra. Accordingly, they proposed the concept of a score that would include both marimba as well as timpani, to the Haydn Orchestra. The orchestra board did not hesitate to add the Double Concerto for Marimba and Timpani to the long list of commissioned works, following a tradition they have cherished for more than sixty years as a renowned cultural institution. The concerto was written by Ney Rosauro during the first months of 2017 and saw its world premiere in the performance on June 5, 2018 at Bolzano, with Mancinelli and Cagnacci as soloists and George Pehlivanian as conductor. A live recording was made of the hugely successful premiere, which again gave birth to the idea of adding two more popular compositions for solo instruments and a lean version for string orchestra to this monumental recording. © Stradivarius

Although little known, the literature for two violins has an ancient history, that on one hand refers to the educational purpose of playing together and reciprocally listening to each other, and on the other hand refers to folk tradition. The compositions featured on this album truly move within all these different perspectives: they are in part folk music pieces, in part pieces with a didactic aim, but above all they are dialogs with a high chamber music value. Bartók and Prokofiev, with the Forty-four duets and the Sonata for two violins gifted us with two cornerstones of the literature for these instruments in the narrow space of two years, 1931 and 1932, opening this repertoire to new textures and new languages. © Stradivarius