This recording follows a first collaboration between Zig-Zag Territoires and Marco Ceccato (Vivaldi sonatas), widely hailed by the press. It is devoted to two important aspects of Luigi Bocherini’s work: chamber music and the cello, of which he was a great virtuoso. The two quintets and the divertimento feature the combination of the string quartet – of which Boccherini was, in a way, the co-founder with Haydn – sometimes with the guitar, sometimes with the flute having place of honour, and always with a delightful use of those instruments’ sound capabilities. And, of course, the cello is then to the fore in the Concerto in G major, a summary of virtuosity and lyricism.

Marco Ceccato and Anna Fontana are well-known performers on the international baroque circuit and familiar faces thanks to their recordings for Outhere labels Alpha, Arcana and Zig-Zag Territoires (including Marco's 2015 Diapason d'or Award winning recording of Boccherini with Accademia Ottoboni). Now they have come together to tackle the two revolutionary works for piano and cello composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1796 and dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia. Their interpretative approach deepens our understanding of the final years of that century when a young Beethoven, a child of the 18th century, was grappling with one of his most extraordinary stylistic innovations. These two expert performers have set out to reconstruct historically reliable versions of the works, linking Beethoven’s revolutionary harmonic solutions with the 18th-century stylistic features that were still in vogue, from phrasings to Beethoven’s meticulously notated articulations.

In Rome between the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth, academies and ‘conversazioni’ (artistic gatherings) organised by aristocrats and cardinals attracted the leading writers and musicians. The names of Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti and the young G. F. Handel stand out among many others. Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier (Rome, c.1660-1700), a cellist and composer known as ‘Giovanni del Violone’, participated in this intensive musical activity. […] When he entered the entourage of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, in 1690, Lulier already had a decade of compositional activity behind him in the genres of oratorio, opera and above all the chamber cantata.