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Harmonia Mundi: HMU907213Tartini - The Devil's Sonata | ||||||||||||||||
"One night I dreamt that I had made a pact with the devil... I was so overcome that I stopped breathing and awoke gasping. The piece I then composed is without doubt my best, and I still call it The Devil's Sonata," said the great seventeenth-century violin virtuoso, prolific composer and famous teacher Giuseppe Tartini. Four of his most dazzling works, including a set of variations drawn from L'arte del arco, make up this CD, all played without basso continuo, just as Tartini intended. | ||||||||||||||||
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Press comments: "We have learnt to take virtuosity for granted with Manze." Gramophone Magazine Editors Choice. "...the Tartini devil-disk is the one every violinist should hear. Manze, like Tartini before him, wreaks total havoc with the score as written, adding chords wholesale, transposing by octaves ad lib and indulging speculatively in all kinds of violinistic effects that were not only unwritten but unwritable at the time. He doubles pitches at the third, adds swells and tremolos, interpolates pizzicatos and natural harmonics with abandon. With his bow he produces a range of colors and articulations never before heard on "Baroque" violin. And what emerges is a violinistic masterpiece." The New York Times "One of the happier developments in the Baroque revival has been the emergence of period instrumentalists who are not afraid to improvise with the freedom of a Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. Among the most exuberant of them is the violinist Andrew Manze. His celebration of the wizardry of the 18th-century master fiddler Giuseppe Tartini, The Devil’s Sonata and Other Works, is astonishing not only for its technical virtuosity but its wittiness." The New York Observer | ||||||||||||||||
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