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Product details |
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| ROMANTIC AND NATIONALIST / CHAMBER ( 1 CD ) |
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Musica has devoted itself to the discovery of rarities
from the chamber repertoire. Its outstanding
instrumentalists have repeatedly succeeded in
returning long-forgotten pearls of chamber music to
the spotlight. This release features a woodwind
portrait of the Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli.
Milan Scala
Ponchielli was from Cremona in Lombardy. Since his
musical talent was discovered while he was still a
young boy, he enrolled as a composition student at
the Milan Conservatory at the age of nine. After
completing his studies in 1854, he was active in his
home region as an organist and a conductor of the
wind ensembles so very popular in everyday music
life. His breakthrough as an opera composer came in
1872. Four years later he celebrated a dazzling
premiere at the Milan Scala with La Gioconda. At the
conservatory he assumed a professorship in
composition and taught students such as Giacomo
Puccini and Pietro Mascagni. He died of pneumonia
at the age of fifty-two in 1886.
Chamber Opera
Ponchielli’s affinity for the opera is also in evidence at
every turn in his chamber music. The clarinet and
violin, in their roles as Paolo and Virginia, seems to
have taken their inspiration straight from the opera
stage: a recitative, cantilenas, dramatic shifts of
mood, and a perfectly formed stretta – this is great
opera. In the Divertimento for Two Clarinets and
Piano and more so in the Quartet for Flute, Oboe,
E flat Clarinet, and Clarinet with Piano
Accompaniment Ponchielli demonstrates his expertise
in the employment of the strengths and resources of
the wind instruments and
the skill with which he knew how to combine them. As
a special treat, the Ensemble Villa Musica, performing
at its best, presents an arrangement of the famous
“Danza delle ore” (Dance of the Hours) for wind nonet
from the opera La Gioconda.
CD Gala
The more than thirty CD recordings of the Ensemble
Villa Musica on the MDG label have quite literally
been showered with prizes and the highest
international praise. The ensemble’s recordings have
won three Echo Klassik prizes – which is only natural,
considering the fact that its membership list reads like
a who’s who of the chamber-musical nobility: Andrea
Lieberknecht and Jean-Claude Gérard (flute), Yeon-
Hee Kwak and Ingo Goritzki (oboe), Ulf Rodenhäuser
(clarinet), Dag Jensen (bassoon), Nicolas
Chumachenco (violin), and Chia Chou and Kalle
Randalu (piano).
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| MDG DABRINGHAUS & GRIMM - MDG 1618 |
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