Our new album “Travelling with a violin” for Calliope-Indésens will be released on October 6th!
This album is devoted entirely to a largely underestimated musician: Giuseppe Torelli. Remaining in the shadow of his contemporary Arcangelo Corelli, Torelli was a musician of prime importance in the development of Baroque instrumental music. Through his inventiveness and musical experimentation, he gave new impetus to the sonata genre and spread the concertante style throughout Europe. His musical heirs – first and foremost Vivaldi – built on his inventions: musical and instrumental techniques, formal division (often into three movements), tonal plan, contribution of improvisation, prefiguration of the concerto cadenza…
In this recording, we present a little-known side of Giuseppe Torelli’s work: the sonatas for violin and continuo, published separately (apart from the numbered opuses) or preserved in manuscript form. This is an area in which the Bolognese master’s imagination is particularly at home, since these are probably works composed for himself or for those close to him: he is therefore constrained neither by the customs and codes of his time, nor by the technical limitations of his performers. These whimsical sonatas are recorded here for the first time, with the exception of the E minor sonata that opens the album, for which we have compared the two surviving manuscript sources. Dresden source (copied by J.G. Pisendel); Bologna source
This recording follows on from our previous album “Dalla biblioteca di Vivaldi? featuring five sonatas copied by Johann Georg Pisendel, who was a pupil of Torelli in Ansbach. A second album dedicated to Torelli will also be released by Calliope-Indésens in 2024, featuring the composer’s manuscript trio sonatas, also hitherto unreleased on record, with the ensemble La Chapelle Saint-Marc.