Sergio Foresti - Porpora: L'aureo Serto Arias - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sergio Fiorentino (1927-1998) exceptionally detested any superficial gestures and facial expressions when sitting at his instrument. In that respect and in his general view on making music he was true to pianists like Rachmaninov and Moiseiwitsch. The utmost technical difficulties were executed by his hands, and he showed neither strain nor superfluous movements, also never compromising in tempo. His hands always close to the keys, he exerted wonders of clear articulation and full piano tone. Never did he sacrifice the music to show off his tremendous technical endowments. Rhine Classics' collection will comprehensively represent all the significant Inchnon-commercialInch recordings left by Fiorentino (from Master's Private Archive), in top-quality remastered sound.

Although the Italian composer, Michelangelo Rossi, was hailed in his lifetime as a violin virtuoso, a distinguished madrigalist and composer of two operas, his reputation is founded on his astonishingly original and technically advanced keyboard music. Album Tracks 1. Toccata I 2. Toccata II 3. Toccata III 4. Toccata IV 5. Toccata V 6. Toccata VI 7. Toccata VII 8. Toccata VIII 9. Toccata IX 10. Toccata X 11. Corrente I 12. Corrente II 13. Corrente III 14. Corrente IV 15. Corrente V 16. Corrente VI 17. Corrente VII 18. Corrente VIII 19. Corrente IX 20. Corrente X

Although this overview of Cavalli's music is necessarily condensed, it nonetheless succeeds in painting a meaningful picture of both the nature of opera as it was developing in Venice at the time, and the composer's own artistic and compositional talent. Cavalli was of course influenced by Monteverdi, yet he imbued his music with his own individual style, in effect setting the artistic seal on the rest of the seventeenth century. The tales told by these early operas had a lot in common with our soap story-lines. Heroes undergo the unlikeliest of hardships, become involved in unrestrained love affairs, get caught out in embarrassing situations, and so on, only for everything to be rapidly unraveled for an unambiguously happy ending, removing all concerns from the minds of a rapt audience (the operatic star system had not yet established itself at this point). There was a sense of liberation from the purely aural allusiveness of the madrigal form, as well as from the compositional and performance difficulties also associated with it, and an increasing interest in the visual impact of the sets and costumes that were soon to become the norm. Madrigal quartets, quintets and sextets were on their way out, seen as music for an aesthetic elite, to be replaced by the more approachable duets. There is perhaps an analogy to be drawn with our own times, in which the spoken and written word are being replaced by a TV videocracy, whose power is taking hold in the same way as opera did in the seventeenth century. By happy coincidence, however, Cavalli was born at precisely the right time and place, and his genius was translated into intricate, convoluted love stories and impetuous passions and rages expressed with perfect aesthetic and expressive musical symbiosis in masterly passacaglias. The Lament can be seen as a kind of condensed version of this artistic sensibility, an opera i