Ruggero Leoncavallo - Cortege de Pulcinella / Valse Mignonne - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

New light on Pergolesi! This album sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of the great Italian composer, offering two masterpieces in their first modern edition and first recording the Mass in D major and the mottettone Dignas Laudes. Both editions are the outcome of recent musicological research carried out by the Centro Studi Pergolesi in Milan, and show a facet of Pergolesi - his energetic and solemn character - that complements and amplifies the dramatic and introspective moods of his most renowned sacred works. This Arcana inaugurates a collaboration with the Ghislieri Choir & Consort and celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the ensemble, which specialises in eighteenth-century sacred repertory and has already recorded works by Galuppi, Jommelli, Perez (Il Mattutino de' Morti) and Handel (Handel in Rome 1707) for Sony-DHM. The soloists on this recording, conducted by Giulio Prandi, are the soprano Marlis Petersen, one of the leading sopranos on the international scene, and a quintet of young Italian singers who already perform in the most important and prestigious European venues.

To Renaissance court of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, arrived an eccentric thirty year old man from Florence. It was 1482. He was a mathematician, anatomist, philosopher, constructor, astronomer... But not many people know, that he was also a musician. One of his 16th century biographers wrote, that the Sforzas hired Leonardo not as a painter nor architect, but - what might surprise us - as a musician and a party organizer of impeccable manners. Leonardo called music a worse sister of painting, because a painting lasts forever and music has no material form. It exists only in the moment of the performance, moreover - it dies in the moment of the birth. That's why music couldn't stand comparison to architecture or sculpture. None of Leonardo's musical compositions survived, but apart from many drawings and fragments of treatises, in his notebooks there are also rebuses and... musical riddles, all written in mirror reflection. In at least 18 riddles, Leonardo da Vinci used musical notation. These musical InchgamesInch were not only notes, but they created sentences, because according to solmisation, a method created by Guido of Arezzo, every note has it's own name - 'ut' (later replaced by a much easier to pronounce 'do'), 're', 'mi', 'fa', 'sol', 'la', 'si'. When put into shape, with decoded meaning of the text, they turn out to be incredibly powerful, hypnotic and nostalgic melodies. The present presents music inspired by Da Vinci's enigmas.

Ravel / Liszt / Prokofiev / Bottscher - Le Tombeau de Couperin/Rondo Capricciosoetudes [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/26/2006