Italian Harp Music

Regular: £11.49

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Cat No: 8554252

Release Date: 02 January 2002

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943425220

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: Italian Harp Music

Description
Italian Harp MusicClementi • Donizetti • Pollini • Rossini • Viotti The harp, one of the most ancient of musical instruments, underwent various technical changes over the centuries. The closing years of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth brought a very notable development in the creation by the French-born, London-based maker Sébastien Erard of the double-action harp, providing, in its perfected form, access to all keys. The existing single-action harp, with its limited modulatory possibilities, had already established itself as an elegant adjunct to the drawing-room, with a repertoire of sonatas and sets of variations calculated to appeal to the taste of the period in performance by young ladies of fashion, like Jane Austen’s Mary Crawford. At the same time there was a more technically adventurous repertoire for virtuosi such as the harpist-composers Krumpholtz and Dussek, Spohr’s wife Dorette, and, later in the nineteenth century, Parish Alvars. Born in Rome in 1752, Muzio Clementi, the son of a silversmith, was bought from his father by Peter Beckford, as the latter alleged, and taken to England at the age of thirteen, spending a period of seven years on Beckford’s Dorset estate, before moving to London in 1774 to embark on a professional career as a keyboard-player. Clementi won some reputation in London and abroad, playing for Queen Marie Antoinette in France in 1780 and two years later for her brother, the Emperor Joseph II, in Vienna. On the latter occasion he appeared together with Mozart, who admitted Clementi’s technical ability, but had nothing good to say of his musical taste and feeling. In England once more, he further established his reputation as a performer and as a teacher, and in the 1790s turned his attention to piano manufacture and music publishing in various partnerships. His piano compositions retain a useful place in repertoire, together with the various pedagogical works that he had completed before his death in Evesham in 1832 and burial in Westminster Abbey. His charming Andante con variazioni is in characteristic style. A native of Piedmont, Giovanni Battista Viotti, the son of a blacksmith who was also an amateur horn-player, owed his musical training to the Marchesa di Voghera, who took him as a boy to Turin, where he later studied the violin with Gaetano Pugnani, himself a pupil of Somis, who could claim violinistic descent from Corelli and possibly also from Vivaldi. Viotti followed his teacher as a member of the court orchestra in Turin, leaving, first, to accompany Pugnani on concert tours abroad and then, in 1784, to enter the service of Queen Marie Antoinette. Four years later, in collaboration with the Queen’s perruquier, he set up the Théâtre de Monsieur in the Tuileries, under the patronage of the King’s younger brother, the Comte de Provence. The revolution led to his eventual departure, in 1792, for London,
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