Ronco Vozza - Six Sonatas for Two Cellos - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The present features the first recording of Johann Carl Bischoff's Six Sonatas for Cello performed by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza on period instruments. Johann Carl Bischoff (1747-1800) was a a German composer and a virtuoso cellist. He became a member of the court orchestra of the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau in the 1770s. In 1793, Bischoff invented a cello-like instrument, which he named the Harmonicello. The instrument had five bowed gut strings and ten sympathetic metal ones. The Six Sonatas, featured here, are rooted in the best classical tradition, but above all are able to anticipate the sublime adventure of German Romantic music.

Beethoven's sacred masterpieces and Helmuth Rilling, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, the Gachinger Kantorei Stuttgart and the outstanding quartets of vocal soloists have achieved world-wide acclaimed in producing a reference recording. Now available in a new 3 box-set, celebrating Beethoven´s anniversary year. Claudio Ronco is undoubtedly among the best artists in Baroque music repertoire, as a skilled Basso Continuo player and a Soloist of virtuoso repertoire. His twenty years of experience with the greatest groups and directors specialized in XVI to XVIIIth Century music, assure him a great stylistic flexibility, together with an extraordinary instrumental virtuosity, so as to distinguish his performances for the freshness of his inventions, spontaneity and elegance. In 2001 he met the cellist Emanuela Vozza who, at the time the first cello of the Bolognese ensemble DSG and of the Cappella Musicale of San Petronio in Bologna, a group created to promote the baroque repertoire, mostly unpublished, preserved in the rich library of this ancient musical institution. The characteristic freshness of her performances and the quality of sound combined with the expressive research, are the qualities that make her playing particularly suitable for facing the chamber music repertoire as well as the difficult art of the Basso Continuo.

This is the first recording dedicated to J.B. Janson, virtuoso, composer and teacher of the second half of the 18th Century. Together with the Duport brothers, he was the major representative of the French cellist school, and in the year of the foundation of the Paris Conservatory he became it's first professor. Unjustly forgotten by history, his first compositions represent in an exemplary way the turning point of European musical taste from the Style Galant to Classicism. In these first two works, the wealth of technical innovations, as well as the narrative and visionary energy of musical inventions, lead us to think that the perfect alchemy arisen from the encounter of a brilliant and infinitely curious mind, which certainly was Berteau's, with the miracle of a child prodigy, ended up in an unfulfilled promise, a broken dream that dissolved into oblivion. Thus the famous Jansons will be forgotten, while the fame of the Duports lingers in the historical memory up to our days.