Antoni / Ciccolini - Pietro Degli Antoni: 12 Sonatas for Violin & Basso - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672-1749) was a priest first and musician second a 'gentiluomo di Trento' as he described himself on the title page of his Op.1 trio sonatas. Chamber music continued to be Bonporti's preferred creative outlet, at a time when cantatas and increasingly operas obtained wider favor, and his increasingly strenuous attempts to gain royal or aristocratic preferment by dedicating and sending his works to kings, queens and princes proved ever fruitless he died as he worked, a humble cleric. Bonporti's gifts as a composer only began to be fully appreciated a century ago, and he can now be regarded among the most gifted north Italian composers of his generation, his music even worthy at points of being mistaken for Bach's, as it has been more than once in confused manuscript collections. The language of Corelli lies behind Bonporti's idiom in these trio sonatas, but his creative imagination ranged far and wide, not indebted to any local or popular idiom but always sympathetically conceived for his instruments, and for the violin in particular. The slow movements are more developed than most contemporary Italian comparisons; at all points Bonporti's imaginative harmony and lively part-writing can be enjoyed by any listener who is keen to look beyond the tried and tested trio sonata repertoire. Founded in 2006, Associazione Labirinti Armonici is an early-music ensemble of flexible formation, led by scholarship and close study of manuscripts and critical editions in it's revival of repertoire from the Baroque. Like Bonporti, the ensemble is based in the Trento region of Italy, making festival appearances and giving masterclasses in early music.

Although Giuseppe Tartini was taught the first rudiments of music at the College of the Padri dell Scuole Pie in Capodistria, and may have received lessons in counterpoint from the Franciscan Bohuslav Cernohorsky in Assisi, many elements give the impression that the boy had an education that was anything but 'academic,' and that the future 'maestro delle nazioni' largely taught himself. However, there does exist a declared model for the music of Tartini, at least for a certain period that of Corelli. His output seems dominated initially by the influence of his great predecessor in terms of both language and structure. The reference to folk music in his music is also obvious. Another interesting element in the sonatas presented on this is the presence of mottoes of varying length placed next to the incipits of certain movements, and often written in a ciphered cuneiform alphabet invented by the composer. These are poetic quotations, mostly drawn from the works of Metastasio, although not all of them have been identified. At the end of this recording is one of Tartini's very rare vocal pieces, the last composition copied into MS 1888/1. The poem Solitario bosco ombroso, based on a clearly Petrarchan model and on the classical antecedents of Tibullus and Propertius, was published for the first time by the poet Paolo Rolli in London in 1727, in a musical setting by Rolli himself.

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