Sirens & Soldiers: Songs without Words from the Italian Seicento

“Just as the worthy and skilled painter imitates all things created in nature by varying the colours, in the same way you can imitate the expression made by the human voice on a wind and stringed instrument”. This concept, which was explained by Silvestro Ganassi in his Opera intitulata La Fontegara already in 1535, has inspired Concerto Scirocco to seek the maximum expression when interpreting the instrumental music of the 16th and 17th centuries. Hand in hand with the development of the instrumental repertoire, rhetoric became the link between instrument and voice, between imitation and reality. Where words were lacking, composers and instrumentalists used rhetoric to delight listeners just as singers did.

In this, its fifth, recording, Concerto Scirocco focuses on an early baroque anthology of pieces, “painting in notes” a number of musical portraits full of contrasts: the pulsating rhythm of the battle in the Symphonia “A gran battaglia”, the beguiling mermaids in Marco Uccellini’s Aria sopra “Questa bella Sirena”, or the operatic tension in the Sonata a tre by Francesco Cavalli.

Concerto Scirocco