This set brings together recordings of Italian music by Chiara Banchini and Amandine Beyer. It is symbolic of a filiation between the two artists, Amandine Beyer having succeeded Chiara Banchini as professor of Baroque violin at the Schola Cantorum in Basle, Switzerland. The release follows Amandine Beyer s recording of Bach s Sonatas for solo violin as well as Chiara Banchini s recording of his Sonatas for violin and keyboard, both of which received a Diapason d Or. The set includes the re-release of Vivaldi s Four Seasons by Amandine Beyer.

The Sablé festival, held annually in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in France, has its own recording concern that it uses primarily to expose young early music artists and to support the most interesting of their projects; the Zig-Zag Territoires label provides an outlet for this endeavor. Here is a wholly worthy enterprise: the group Gli Incogniti – led by the fabulous young violinist Amandine Beyer – in a program drawn from various works of mysterious late seventeenth-century violinist Nicola Matteis, its title, False Consonances of Melancholy, fashioned after one of his publications, but not limited to its contents. As Matteis is not a household name, some summary of his place in the scheme of things is not out of order here: born in Naples, possibly contemporary to Heinrich von Biber, Matteis was an itinerant musician in Germany before making his way to London about 1670.

Here's one of those discs that throws multiple innovations at the listener, any one of which alone might have made sense but which are a bit overwhelming taken together. You may be puzzled to see four Bach violin concertos listed; what's happening is that two of them, BWV 1052 and BWV 1056, were transcribed from harpsichord concertos on the theory that Bach himself made similar transcriptions in the opposite direction.

Whether we call them ‘Mystery’ or ‘Rosary’ Sonatas, these fifteen pieces crowned by a sublime passacaglia for unaccompanied violin form one of the greatest violinistic masterpieces of the Baroque repertory. This version by Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti, derived from a dance project with the Rosas company, leads us into their magical universe through a novel prism: that of movement, to which these pieces are an infinite ode!

Vivaldi’s concerti con molti stromenti are true precursors of the symphony in their amplitude and audacity. In these pieces, the ‘Red-haired Priest’, a creator of boundless imagination, amused himself by devising literally unheard of combinations of timbres.

Rosenmüller, a prodigiously talented German musician and composer, found himself imprisoned in Leipzig for obscure ‘sex offences’: had his presence there become embarrassing? But he managed to escape to Hamburg, then reached the free and ‘Most Serene’ Republic of Venice, where he eventually taught at the Ospedale della Pietà, long before Vivaldi.

Francois Couperin 1668-1733. Gli incogniti, Early Music Ensemble, Amandine Beyer (violin). When he published his two Apotheoses in memory of two great masters of music in 1724-25, Couperin was asserting his desire to promote a meeting of the French and Italian styles, from a very Gallic point of view, naturally. The idea was to convince the French muses that henceforth one could say sonade and cantade in their language, a strategy already persued in the much earlier La Sultane and La Superbe. But, far from blindly imitating his idols, Couperin takes inspiration from their styles and adapts them to his own brio. The results is a delight for all to share with the musicians of Gli incogniti and Amandine Beyer who's debut Harmonia Mundi label recording this is.

This VIVALDI/CORELLI/BEYER collection groups interpretations by Amandine Beyer and the ensemble Gli Incogniti of major works by two Italian composers: Vivaldi and Corelli. Here again, Amandine Beyer demonstrates her exceptional talent as both a violinist and ‘bandleader’, giving these works, which illustrate the art of the concerto at the beginning of the 18thcentury, a certain Italian vocal quality in a particularly felicitous and invigorating interpretation.

With these six symphonies dedicated to Baron van Swieten, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach demonstrated his talent for instrumental and expressive genius. Entirely devoid of sentimentality and gratuitous extravagance, they open the doors to both Viennese Classicism and its immediate successor: Romanticism. It was only natural that, after tackling Haydn and the Esterházy princes, Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti should investigate this repertoire in which, once again, aristocratic patronage lies at the heart of musical creation.