Cocset Balestracci Les Basses Réunies - Trattado de Glosas - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

G. Puccini - Crespin Di Stefano [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/02/2012

The arpeggione, invented in 1823 by the Viennese luthier Johann Georg Stauffer, had a curious destiny. As it's alternative names 'guitar violoncello' and 'guitare d'amour' suggest, it is in fact a guitar fitted with a bridge, held between the knees like a cello and played with a bow. The instrument enjoyed some success for around a decade, but, oddly enough, almost nothing has survived from it's specific repertory except one supreme masterpiece the sonata Franz Schubert wrote for it in 1824. The guitar was very popular in Vienna at that time, and Schubert was also fond of it; the original version of Die schöne Müllerin was published with guitar accompaniment! Guido Balestracci and the musicians of L'Amoroso have built a delightful Schubertiad around this famous sonata, combining the arpeggione and the piano with voice and guitars to appropriate a rich selection of the Viennese composer's lieder.

Throughout his life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart repeatedly devoted himself to the genre of the accompanied piano sonata. He wrote the earliest works at the age of eight, to perform them either with his sister on the harpsichord and himself on the violin or with his father, the famous violin teacher, and sitting at the harpsichord himself. Leopold Mozart himself assured his son in a letter that he would count him among the best violin players in Europe - the composer himself preferred to see himself as a piano virtuoso and (of course) above all as a 'compositeur' who had a lot to say. The works recorded here also move within this area of tension. If the violin still plays a clearly subordinate role in the youth sonatas to the brilliant harpsichord part, which also leads in the cantabile slow movements, this distribution of roles changes over the time in favor of the violin. In the 'middle' phase of Mannheim, the renunciation of the violin would mean a painful loss, and in the later Vienna sonatas there is finally a true partnership between the two instruments with equal rights. The joyful virtuoso part is still reserved for the piano.