NESHIMA is Orí Harmelin’s exciting debut solo lute and theorbo album. Orí explores a new realm of possibilities for personal creation as a modern musician using the musical language of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The album contains Orí’s arrangements of Madrigals, Motets and Chansons by Cipriano de Rore, Josquin des Prez and Thomas Tallis, alongside his own compositions of variation...
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater was extremely popular throughout Europe soon after it was composed in 1736. Countless printed and handwritten versions of this work, which was considered the stylistic ideal of sacred music in the 18th century, can be found in libraries all over the world. There are five manuscript copies of the Stabat Mater in the archives of Málaga Cathedral. This recording presents a...
The Partitas are the first work for harpsichord published by Johann Sebastian Bach. Between 1726 and 1730, the partitas were published separately, one per year, before being brought together in a single collection in 1731. Shortly after his appointment of Cantor of the Leipzig Thomaskirche, Bach decided to devote his Opus I to a fashionable genre: the harpsichord suite, a series of dances of...
The Italian Renaissance is the golden age of the lute. In quality and quantity, the lute pieces from this period are comparable to the piano works of the 19th century. Most of the works selected for this recording are by Francesco da Milano, an extraordinary virtuoso and gifted composer who was also known as "Il Divino" (the Divine), an epithet he shared with Michelangelo and Monteverdi. In...
We may wonder whether the violin was a northern Italian invention, for the instrument was also to be heard in the great cities of southern Italy at an early stage, from the beginning of the 17th century onwards. Certain southern Italian composers had clearly understood that the instrument was unequalled in its ability to express emotion allied to virtuosity, including Montalbano in Palermo,...
Il violoncello di Corelli leads us to the origins of the solo cello literature – although one should actually use the term violone. In fact, the cello, as we know it today in its standard form, had many different sizes before its current proportions became generally established. Some instruments were larger, and the smaller ones were referred to by the diminutive form of the term violone –...
Dominik Wörner (bass-baritone) and the Kirchheimer DübenConsort he founded focus in this recording on twelve pieces from the famous Düben collection and document in an exemplary way the enormous versatility of this unique collection, which was only discovered by chance in the 19th century. Ten composers from Schütz (his Nunc dimittis can be heard in an arrangement by Gustav Düben) to...