Manfredini: Sei Sonate per due violini e basso continue

Francesco Manfredini
Sei Sonate per due violini e basso continue
Ensemble Orfei Farnesiani
Tactus TC 681301

Much has been written about Bologna greatness as a barycentre town of the European music culture but a historically detailed survey on its protagonists has not found its right dimension yet. A space enabling us to understand the total artistic reality of the second town of the Papal States in the field of its music wonders, from the end of the XVI till the middle of the XVIII century, showing how they can reproduce themselves in the wholeness of their main aspects: the town, seen both in the Court sphere and in the Church sovereignty, as a real developing laboratory and not as a simple storehouse anthology of practical examples. In this extraordinary shop the Bolognese school probably gives birth to the most extraordinary names of the middle baroque which finds in Laurenti, Degli Antonii, Torelli, Perti and Corelli its most authoritative witnesses. In this tradition the artistic parabola of Francesco Onofrio Manfredini (Pistoia, 1684 – there, 1762) outlines: he was the continuator of Giuseppe Torelli’s progressive aesthetics – the latter was the first master who put him in touch with the complex elaboration of the baroque instrumental music, in the same period in which in Rome Arcangelo Corelli’s and the Venice school’s stars, finding its absolute top with Antonio Vivaldi, shone more than ever.