Recommended Sheet Music,
Consonarte publications now available!
Many of you will know Anna Bonitatibus as one of the most acclaimed artists in the international operatic and concert landscape. What you may not know is that she is also co-founder of the Consonarte publishing enterprise with her husband Frank Bonitatibus.
Seeking to renew appreciation for the Italian vocal chamber repertoire, Consonarte's catalogue covers an extensive period of time, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Works by composers such as Vincenzo Gabussi, Luigi Gordigiani, Giovan Battista Perucchini from the first half of the 19th century, Giuseppe Martucci - representing the last decades of the 19th century – followed by Mario Pilati, and Guarini, are amongst their available publications. They also plan to publish collections of songs taken from the less explored parts of the world of Italian melodrama, with selected pages for different vocal registers.
The lack of awareness of the Italian vocal chamber music heritage has undoubtedly made obtaining scores difficult. With the support of a group of expert musicologists, musicians, and researchers, Anna Bonitatibus has undertaken the long and patient work of identifying and reorganizing the huge abundance of surviving musical materials, in the hope of reviving its popularity. Every volume is loyal to the original sources, subjected to careful critical examination, and supported by an apparatus rich in historical and stylistic information.
We are excited to announce that Consonarte publications are now available from Presto Music. The exceptional quality paired with the outstanding scholarly research and care that goes into every publication makes this catalogue a welcome addition! You can browse all available publications and read our interviews with Anna Bonitatibus below.
Browse Consonarte Publications
Consonarte
Examining in more detail the repertory for voice and pianoforte, it can be said that Gandino starts with established traditional structures, within which however he is capable of immediately introducing elements of novelty: from the very first attempt, the constant use of the word lirica, bearing testimony to an idea of composition in which the poetic element is established even from the title as the cornerstone of the creative act.
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The renown of a person does not always correspond to his importance, and the case of Alberto Mazzucato, composer of Quattro melodie, is a confirmation of this: the role he played in Italian (and especially Milanese) musical life of the nineteenth century was far from secondary, influencing various aspects of the musical culture of his age more than might be imagined.
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Text by Cristian Bonomi, Preface by Pietro Dossena, and score editing Alessandro Monga. The first edition of this work.
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It cannot and should not be thought that the relationship between Dante and Romantic music is limited to large-scale orchestral works or the most sonorous of vocal compositions. The chamber song (as evidenced by this collection, in which all vocal types find space, and which covers a time span of about a century) in fact reveals a notable variety of approach to Dante’s poetry.
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For the period extending from the second half of 1824 to the unexpected invitation from Palermo to assume the post of Maestro di cappella at the Teatro Carolino (where Donizetti will arrive on 6 April 1825), there is little information: from this time are the Cantata La fuga di Tisbe and the Credo composed for Bergamo; but above all, we know that Gaetano is in Naples and that he is thinking of Virginia, the young girl he met in Rome at the Vasselli home.
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Twenty-four salon vocal compositions composed by the Venetian nobleman Giovanni Battista Perucchini. One of the best examples of the typology of the Italian "lirica da camera” of the early nineteenth century, which shares with the better known contemporary Lieder genre (Schubert first and foremost) a style and manner of composing and music-making.
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The form chosen for the arias is almost always tripartite, with the sole exception of the concluding piece, Il ritorno, in which Crescentini experiments with the more modern articulation of two tempi, typical of the rondos which he so often performed on the stages of half of Europe during the years of his successful artistic career.
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Giuseppe Martucci’s opus 68 is a highly significant work: a cycle of six songs for voice and piano, it fills - together with La canzone dei ricordi, a slightly earlier work - an obvious gap in Italian musical production of the time.
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This edition of the Canti italiani derives from a new, careful and considered reading of the earliest sources. An assessment of these, together with a brief summary of the music-history context, is given for each individual piece in the collection. To promote the greatest possible uptake, in performative terms, of these compositions, this edition offers transposed versions for each, adopting a practice already common in Beethoven’s time.
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Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian provides a few helpful starting-points for a discussion about the history of Luigi Cherubini’s song collection that is the subject of this critical edition. Cherubini’s music is cast in the form of the romance of the late 18th century. The accompaniment, which according to the title page of the collection is intended either for pianoforte or harp, does not undermine comprehension of the text.
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Despite his lack of success with opera, Luigi’s fame gradually grew, in Italy and abroad, but solely thanks to his vocal chamber compositions: he was acclaimed in Paris, London, Florence, while his romanze were published by the most important Italian and foreign publishers, and there was even a reviewer who went so far as to declare that “this Italian composer of songs is the equal of the German Schubert”.
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Mario Pilati takes a leading position among the ranks of Italian composers who have been unjustly forgotten. His compositional output spans diverse genres: from piano music to chamber music, from vocal music to choral and symphonic music. He was also the composer of an opera: Piedigrotta, he managed to finish only the first act. This is the first printed edition of the Due Madrigali del Guarini.
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Collection of Variations on the original theme by Paisiello. Jean-François Lesueur described La molinara as “this masterpiece among the many masterpieces of Paisiello”. Even today the score stands out in the repertoire of this composer from Taranto for its inventive joyfulness and Neapolitan wit, more brilliant and sceptical than usual, that characterise the much-ado-about-nothing of Rachelina’s entanglements.
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It is not certain when exactly Zingarelli wrote Ero, but the piece is likely to have emerged in the early years of the 19th century, when Zingarelli was back from Paris and, at least in terms of secular music, still keen to experiment with “advanced” musical modes. The vocal line and musical accompaniment, although mostly made up of conventional figures, are unusual in the rapidity of their changing textures.
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"I had taken up singing again and together with Ottorino I began to study some of his liriche [art songs] and some antiche cantate d’amore [early love cantatas] harmonized by him ... he expressed his certainty of our being able within a few months to give fine concerts together. That was my dream! More than three hundred and fifty concerts we later gave in Europe and North and South America, between 1920 and 1932." In these impassioned lines written by Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo Respighi, wife (as well as pupil) of the Maestro, we learn not only of the preparations for their concert activity but also of the existence of the cycle we present here in its first printed edition.
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The search for a «personal ideal sound world» is a constant among many artistic approaches of very different composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, often associated with the exploration of new technical and instrumental possibilities and driven by the desire to identify the distinctive characteristics of the composers’ own individual style, and whose roots may be identied in any history of western art music.
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For the poetic text of Virginia, Mercadante turned to the pen of Calisto Bassi: he had certainly dealt with the poet in relation to the libretti of his last two ‘Viennese’ operas, in all probability composed during that same period (Le nozze di Telemaco ed Antiope and Il podestà di Burgos). The incident that provides the subject matter of the cantata is taken from Book III of The History of Rome by Titus Livius (27 B.C. - 14 A.D.) and was the basis of a play by Vittorio Alfieri (1777-83).
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The harmonic vocabulary of Silvio Mix appears very varied and in general quite far from the concept of tonality in the classic/historical sense. It will be noted that all the pieces included in this selection constitute “small forms”, in other words, they are all of short duration; we do not know if this is the result of a particular aesthetic-stylistic orientation rather than a kind of mistrust (or fear) of “large forms”. However, the results cannot but vindicate the composer.
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This elegant volume presents in first modern edition (and largely in first edition in absolute) thirteen Arias, in a reduction for Voice and Piano, from Operas of the 18th and 19th centuries dedicated to the fascinating personality of Semiramide. The publication is accompanying, in this rediscovering activity, the recording of Semiramide.
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For medium female or male voices.
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Ellena Taylor - Sheet Music and Books Manager
