This is one of the craziest classical CDs you will ever hear, but the madness is inspired. Andrew Manze, following a suggestion in one of Tartini's letters, gets rid of the published accompaniment and plays these pieces on the solo violin. In the other three works he takes plenty of liberties, but in the famous Devil's Trill Sonata he embellishes, improvises, departs from the text and comes back again. The verbal description sounds like my idea of a nightmare, but the execution is so inspired that this is one of the most compelling Baroque performances ever. Whether it is "authentic" or not, I have no idea, and Manze probably doesn't either. But this is a recording you will remember.

Though Mönkemeyer’s playing has an evident sense of period, he’s not performance practice, he’s not hidebound by the imperatives of the time-honoured treatises. He revels in Paganini’s honeyed lyricism, and brings a finely-honed intensity to interpolated cadenzas…L’arte del mondo directed by Werner Ehrhardt prove spirited companions.

To celebrate the epic recording career of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Deutsche Grammophon presents a comprehensive box set that brings together for the first time all of his recordings for DG, Decca and Philips; in addition to the Westminster/Melodija recordings from their archives. Presented with the original jackets, this limited edition 37CD box features legendary recordings with Karajan, Argerich, Mutter, Britten, Richter, Serkin and more!

Giuseppe Tartini was a major 18th-century figure, a violinist-composer who from his base in Padua became one of Europe’s most admired players and teachers. Charles Burney, visiting Padua in 1770, regretted that he was only able to visit Tartini’s grave (though that ‘with the zeal of a Muslim in Mecca’), the great man having died just a few months earlier; ‘he was,’ wrote Burney, ‘one of the few original geniuses of our century, in the sense that all his ideas were his own.’

In the course of his illustrious career, Fabio Biondi has nurtured a remarkable empathy with Italian music from across many centuries, but strikingly so with the early Baroque violin sonata repertory, the development of which was dramatically propelled into the future by Arcangelo Corelli with his Op 5 collection. It is this empathy possessed by Biondi which has inspired the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (from its bowed instrument collection) to make him a loan of the precious 1690 “Tuscan” violin made by Antonio Stradivari, for this Glossa recording.

The English, historical-instrument, Baroque ensemble La Serenissima (the term was a nickname for the city of Venice) has specialized in somewhat scholarly recordings that nevertheless retain considerable general appeal, and the group does it again with this release. The program offers some lesser-known composers, and some lesser-known pieces by famous composers like the tiny and fascinating Concerto alla rustica for two oboes, bassoon, strings, and continuo, RV 151. What ties the program together formally is that it covers a range of Italian cities that were becoming cultural centers as they declined in political power: not only Venice (Vivaldi, Albinoni, Caldara), but also Padua (Tartini), Bologna (Torelli), and Rome (Corelli). There are several works by composers known only for one or two big hits, and these are especially rewarding. Sample the opening movement of Tartini's Violin Concerto E major, DS 51, with its unusual phrase construction and daringly chromatic cadenza passage: it has the exotic quality for which Tartini became famous, but it does not rely on sheer virtuosity. That work is played by leader Adrian Chandler himself, but he also chooses pieces for a large variety of other solo instruments: the Italian Baroque was about more than the violin. Each work on the album has something to recommend it, and collectively the performances may make up the best album of 2017 whose booklet includes footnotes.

Trumpet Star, Alison Balsom, Transforms The Traditional Italian Baroque Concerto In This New EMI Classics Release Following the popular and critical international success of her Haydn and Hummel concertos recording, Alison Balsom has recorded a program of Italian Baroque concertos. In this new recording, Balsom, plays various popular concertos originally composed for the violin or oboe by Vivaldi, Tartini, B. Marcello, Albinoni and Cimarosa, accompanied by the Scottish Ensemble. This collection provides an apt vehicle for the award-winning trumpeter's characteristic brilliance and grace.Alison Balsom, an exclusive EMI Classics recording artist, studied trumpet at the Guildhall School of Music, the Paris Conservatoire, and with Håkan Hardenberger.

Dimitry Sinkovsky is a dazzlingly multi-talented artist a brilliant violinist, countertenor, conductor, and founder in 2011 of the ensemble La Voce Strumentale. In Virtuosissimo, his fifth venture with Naïve, he has teamed up again with the ensemble Il Pomo dOro, his partners in numerous recordings and concerts, to cast more light on Pisendel, a celebrated violinist and composer who led the prestigious Dresden Court Orchestra, and a Vivaldi devotee who copied out several of the Venetian masters concertos for performance in Dresden.

To call the Comte de St Germain (ca 1710-1784) - by the way only one of his numerous names - a "dazzling character" does not even begin to capture the life, work and barely comprehensible person! The recording on COVIELLO deals here with the violinist and composer (undoubtedly one of his more serious biographical facets) and combines his violin sonatas published by John Walsh in London in 1750 and 1758 respectively with music by another composing violinist, Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770), whose life is also shrouded in legend.

“Indisputably the most consummate artist in the history of the classical trumpet,” was how Gramophone described Maurice André, a musician characterised by both brilliance and refinement. These six CDs, which give pride of place to music from the 18th and 20th centuries, complement some of the most popular concertos ever written for trumpet with an enticing and fascinating selection of rarely-heard works.

To publish this complete edition of Giuseppe Tartini’s Violin Concertos is not only a source of pride for a record label like Dynamic, which in its 36 years of activity has built a considerable catalogue of violin music. This edition is an artistic and historical document of indisputable musicological importance for anyone wishing to have a philologically reliable testimony of this aspect of 18th-century Italian instrumental music, valuable, therefore, for more than the mere dimension of listening.

After devoting a disc to sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini, for this anniversary year of the illustrious Paduan virtuoso, Evgeny Sviridov offers us a recording of violin concertos. This is his first collaboration with Millenium Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Leonardo García Alarcón in the framework of CAVEMA in Namur. Most of the concertos selected come from manuscript copies made in eighteenth-century Germany, where Tartini's reputation was very high. Evgeny Sviridov has found in these scores cadenzas and ornaments which are very probably in the hand of Johann Georg Pisendel, the great virtuoso violinist of the Dresden court, a friend (and interpreter) of Johann Sebastian Bach!

Anyone can set out to perform and record a set of compositions by a given composer. But to truly take the time to bring listeners into the world of both composer and performer, and to engage the listener with as many senses as possible, makes for a truly exceptional recording. Such is the case with this album of Tartini's Sonatas for Solo Violin with violinist Chiara Banchini and soprano Patrizia Bovi. Tartini made a habit of writing excerpts from poetry in the margins of his scores – works that he presumably read before writing to gain inspiration.

Thibault Noally and Les Accents present a celebration of the Venetian Sonata. The term sonata was first coined at the end of the 16th century by Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli but it was Tartini, born and active in the Venetian Republic, who created some 200 sonatas for violin, the largest body of work in the form, followed by Vivaldi with 80. If Vivaldi borrowed from all an sundry [Caldara, Corelli, Matteis, Bonporti, Albinoni] then others were quick to borrow from him too and the Venetian sonata spread through competing musicians to Germany, via Pisendel and the Dresden court; France with Leclair and Guignone; and Russia with the Venetians Madonis and Dall'Oglio. Thibault Noally is a recognised name on the international baroque stage. He best-known as the solo violin of Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble with Marc Minkowski, with the Concerto Köln, Pulcinella or the Ensemble Matheus.

For his new album 'Soave e virtuoso', Alexis Kossenko went on the trail of rare scores from the baroque era, reminding us that Italian repertory might give pride of place to the the violin and voice, but doesn’t forget wind instruments. At the head of his ensemble Les Ambassadeurs, the conductor and flautist Alexis Kossenko performs concertos by Tartini, Vivaldi and Sammartini: often voluptuous, sometimes dreadfully acrobatic, these scores require technique and sensitivity from the soloist. With a jubilant virtuosity, at the service of expressiveness, Alexis Kossenko, multi-skilled musician as at ease with flute as with recorder, brings new life to the works of the three Italian masters.