Italian violinists invaded germanic countries from the beginning of the 17th century, with Farina in Dresden, Marini in Neuburg and Bertali in Vienna. Their influence was considerable, stretching over the entire Empire to the furthest flung towns of Central or Northern Germany. The Italian sonata went hand in hand with the violin, exemplifying a taste for the fantastic and the baroque. Michal Praetorius, despite his knowledge of Italian musical practice, preferred to discuss the instrument under its German name of "Geige", although the term of "violino" soon began to appear in every musical publication In this eagerly awaited, special prized re-release of his remarkable anthology of early violin music, François Fernandez gives a us a masterly and higly seductive lesson of style.

In the Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, instrumental music became a source of sonic and expressive experimentation. Influenced by vocal rhetoric, composers sought to replace words with a new musical language. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists developed, as did invention, improvisation and the search for surprising sonorities. Along with the organ or the harpsichord, the violin was the instrument of choice for experimenting with these new techniques. Italian and German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Farina, Schmelzer, Mealli, Buxtehude, Biber, Pisendel and Bach vied with each other in imaginativeness… The violinist Chouchane Siranossian and the harpsichordist Leonardo García Alarcón – both loyal Alpha Classics artists – have chosen to explore this repertory, here including Bach’s sonatas BWV 1019, 1021 and 1023 among other pieces.

« On retrouve…le même élan, cette beauté sonore, cette profonde musicalité »… »la musique émouvante, déchirante jusqu’au dernier soupir. Le théâtre n’est pas loin, mais le drame se dessine à l’opposé de tout excès, de toute solllicitation dramatique ou émotive. Nigel Rogers chante…avec un sens de la prosodie, une clarté d’élocution et une sobriété de la ligne musicale ». –Opéra International

The works of the early Baroque Italian composers featured on this CD all make some kind of use of the new virtuoso violin technique. Thus they enable us to understand how, as a result of untold experiments, a technique that was specifically suited to the violin gradually began to emerge.