Nicola Reniero - Sonatas for Viola Da Gamba & Harpsichord - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

SPOON / LUCIFER ON THE SOFA - Spoon's tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is alive, vital and inarguably the band's heaviest work to date. The first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in it's hometown, Austin, in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years ' both in and out of shutdown ' these songs feel like a culmination of Spoon's career while marking a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more vivid.

The three sonatas by Bach of this album are likely to rank among the most famous and most performed compositions for viola da gamba, and they represent one of the tops of the literature for this instrument. Nevertheless for this recording was used the viola da braccio, according to the practice of the Baroque era which precedes and accompanies the decline of the viola da gamba. These pieces are composed as a trio sonata, a favorite genre by the Maestro. They are mainly based on polyphonic writing, in which no instrument prevails over the other. In some pieces the organ was used in place of the harpsichord, a choice of the performers to explore new varieties of timbre and offer different instrumental colors.

The five-part writing for strings has it's period of greatest development in the 16th and 17th centuries, only to fall into a progressive obsolescence. The most commonly used instrumental ensemble included two violins, alto and tenor viola da braccio, cello and basso continuo. Of this quintet, the instrument that undergoes a progressive dismissal is the viola tenore, which in this recording we propose in it's original late seventeenth century mounting.