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Beyond Vivaldi – Lute Concertos on CD

Composed during Antonio Vivaldi's stay in Prague in 1729-30, the Concerto for Lute RV 93 is the most celebrated example of a repertoire almost totally neglected today, but once extremely popular in the German-speaking world, particularly in the Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia. After offering us a reference edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach (2022) and a representative anthology of the output of Silvius Leopold Weiss (2024), Evangelina Mascardi concludes her 18th-century trilogy by illuminating a fundamental, yet hitherto largely sidelined, chapter in the history of the lute. Alongside the Vivaldi concerto, which guitarists have embraced since the early 1960s, making it one of his most acclaimed works, we find four genuine and practically unknown gems, such as those composed by Joachim Bernard Hagen and Karl Ignaz Augustin Kohaut, now given their first recording. Accompanied by the Estrovagante Orchestra, directed by Riccardo Doni, Mascardi ventures into the rococo idiom, the stylistic context for the final virtuosic showpieces of an instrument boasting a rich history, but destined-in the space of just a few years-to be definitively eclipsed.