Following on from the noteworthy album ‘1600', released in 2012, ‘1700' is a vibrant homage to Italian Baroque, in which Rinaldo Alessandrini has brought together the most outstand-ing Italian composers of the first half of the eighteenth century: Locatelli, Mascitti, Vivaldi, Caldara, Durante, Ga-luppi and Pugnani. All of these com-posers went into exile, serv-ing prestigious foreign courts. They each evolved the ‘Italian style,’ based either on their own tastes or those of the country in which they had taken refuge. Each composer created his own share of wonders, to which Maestro Alessandrini’s intelligent and re-fined interpretation brings a passionate fresh perspective.

“Throughout the eighteenth century, and to a considerable extent, the fate of many Italian composers was to emigrate, and serve at courts and chapels far from home. Many of them broke away from the rules governing the legato style of their home country, developing a completely independent personality through the mingling of musical languages and the superimposition of tastes and fashions. Accordingly, in their works national styles lose their sharply-defined con-tours, as they undergo a process of personal and subtle assimilation of the most striking aspects of their host country’s musical culture.

In particular, the Italians exported their taste for melodic cantabile, their elegance, and a certain kind of histrionic individualism inherited from the opera stage and the great instrumental virtuosi. The encounter with musical Europe often caused a realignment of those elements, though they remained one of the multiple components of the composers’ personalities.”