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.

Even today, more than seventy years after his death, Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff remains an enigmatic figure. Despite access to his writings and music, defining him is no straightforward task. His message was far from a simple directive aimed solely at his contemporaries. It was a profound teaching, gleaned from his extensive travels to the East, which came at the cost of immense personal sacrifices. It is a call to inner evolution, charting a course for both current and future generations. His teachings act as a bridge between Eastern wisdom and Western science.

Myth and Memory, intertwined like the two faces of a coin, at times are indistinguishable and at other times alternate in their appearance. This journey through epochs marks the progression from an era brimming with noble aspirations to one tinged with deterioration. At this passage’s extremes, the Waltzes of Brahms and Ravel emerge, with the epicenter being the intimate universe of my memories, encompassing my origins (Symphonic Pieces) and my lineage (Nené Waltz). Dance, especially the waltz, is a dominant theme here, symbolizing both the twilight of the 19th century and the closure of an entire period.

This project was born with the intention of shed light on female composers and their compositions that I consider essential to the guitar repertoire.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is one of the most fascinating figures of Italian twentieth-century music, but, unfortunately, his works are not as frequently performed as they would deserve and his figure lacks the worldwide recognition it merits. Notwithstanding this, it is safe to affirm that Castelnuovo-Tedesco stands out as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century and one who was able to develop a highly original language in fervent dialogue with all the major trends of his era, but also without being overwhelmingly influenced by them.

The harp and the guitar have the quality of perfectly blending their sound together, due to the many similarities of two instruments that both belong to the plucked-string family. If there is good understanding between the two musicians, the effect seems like that of a single instrument; this is the case with the Duo formed by Morgana Rudan and Roberto Guarnieri, who manage to unite the sounds so much that they often merge into a perfectly created timbral combination.

In art, theory and practice often influence each other, and it is frequently impossible to establish which one comes first. In music, in particular, theorizations are most commonly an ex post formalization of what has been uncontroversially employed by performing musicians and “composers” (of written music or of improvised music). The relationship between improvisation, oral tradition and composition is also a multifaceted one: on the one hand, folk music can be more conservative than the “cultivated” repertoire, whose composers deliberately choose to explore new ways. On the other, however, folk tradition may be more open to new ideas, in the absence of written rules and of the dynamics of “academic” musicianship. (This does not imply, of course, that there are no rules in folk music, oral tradition, or improvisation: quite the contrary. A folk improviser is deeply rooted in a tradition made of implicit or explicit rules, which must be obeyed and can be transgressed only within a delicate balance of acknowledgment of the improviser’s genius and social approval).
One field in which the divergence between “cultivated” music and folk music can be very pronounced is that of modality. This technical word of the musical jargon refers to “modes” of organizing musical pitches.

This Da Vinci Classics album explores two crucial aspects of Bach’s output and of his style. On the one hand, there is the “Italianness” of his music; on the other, the pedagogical dimension.
Bach is rightly considered as one of the undiscussed champions of German music; not only because he is one of the greatest composers (if not the greatest) who ever lived in today’s Germany, but also because he displays some traits which are typical for the German Baroque. Among them, an interest for intricate polyphony which was already disappearing in the coeval music of other countries. Even among his contemporaries and peers, and even in Germany, Bach’s music was particularly complex under this viewpoint; he was even seen as antiquated by some, precisely because the international trends of the late Baroque era were pointing toward greater lightness and simplicity, in what would become the style galante, Rococo and then the Classical style.

The center of the city of Naples is a labyrinth of narrow streets, frequently called “vico”. In Vincenzo Caruso’s definition, a vico is “a narrow street – an alley that winds between large Italian historic buildings”. Unless one knows the map by heart, it is practically impossible not to get lost in that intricate web of minuscule openings between old buildings. It is also fascinating to lose oneself, vico after vico, savouring the unmistakable and unique colours, sounds, scents and impressions of a city like no other. If one would feel the need for a further, imaginary vico after so many actual ones, the pianist and composer of this Da Vinci Classics album, Vincenzo Caruso, created a new, hidden vico just for his listeners. He called it Vico Novecento, and drew it, in an imagined map, as a line connecting the Conservatory of Naples (San Pietro a Majella) to a publishing company, Casa Musicale Simeoli, opposite it. Caruso explains: “I imagine a frequent coming and going of composers, teachers of the conservatory, who in a few steps were in the sheet music shop to check that their works had been printed correctly”.

This recording gathers, for the first time[1], the complete original compositions for the organ by Giacomo Puccini (Lucca, December 22, 1858 – Brussels, November 29, 1924), collected and published in 2017 under the guidance of Virgilio Bernardoni in volume II/2.1 of the National Edition of Giacomo Puccini’s Works (Carus-Verlag 56.003).
It is thanks to the musicological efforts of the Giacomo Puccini Study Center in Lucca that, between 2015 and 2017, many of these compositions for the organ resurfaced. They had been scattered across various collections. Altogether, there are 57 pieces composed between 1870 and 1880, during the period when the young music student served as an organist in Lucca and neighboring towns.

Although it was not common to study Johann Sebastian Bach’s music in Italy in the nineteenth century, Ferdinando Busoni (1834-1909), a clarinet player, used it as the foundation for his son’s music education. Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) expressed gratitude for his father’s unconventional instruction in the epilogue to his edition of Bach’s keyboard works.

«Encouraged by my esteemed friend and colleague Jakob Ortner, a respected guitar master in Vienna, my fascination for this instrument and its repertoire grew immensely. Regrettably, I discovered that guitar literature had slumbered for over half a century.

The flute and guitar duo is a particularly successful chamber music ensemble, even though the original repertoire for this formation is not limitless. It is, in fact, an almost ideal pairing, granting timbral variety thanks to the utter difference between the two instruments. They are also well matched as concerns dynamics, since none of them is among the loudest instruments of the Western tradition: a flute and guitar duo finds its perfect context in an intimate setting, such as a room where the audience coincides with the players, who perform for their own enjoyment, or a salon, where a restricted, selected audience will be able to appreciate all shades and nuances of their playing.

Most composers who left major contributions to the guitar repertoire were guitarists themselves. Yet there are some notable exceptions, one of which is precisely Manuel Ponce. And what many of these “notable exceptions” have in common, in turn, is their friendship with a great guitarist, whose talent, skill and expertise frequently inspired them to compose, and attracted them to an instrument which has a very pronounced personality. In fact, the guitar is almost a standalone in the world of classical music. It blends only seldom with other classical instruments in chamber music; it appears even more rarely in a symphonic or chamber orchestra, except as a soloist; and many composers who signed the great guitar masterpieces focused almost exclusively on it, whilst most great composers in the classical tradition wrote very little, if anything, for the guitar.

The aim of this artistic project is to revive some of the most significant musical compositions that have shaped the history of two unique instruments from the classical-romantic period: the bass clarinet and basset horn. Although these instruments were first constructed in the 18th century, they underwent a long evolution before reaching their current form. Furthermore, it took some time for them to be fully appreciated by composers.