150 years of plucked strings
C. Goodwin · Early Music · 2012
The crop of plucked-string recordings considered here all come from the second half of the lute’s golden age, from the turn of the 17th century to the middle of the 18th. We may call this the Baroque era, but the life of Bellerofonte Castaldi fulfils all the stereotypes of the larger-than-life ‘Renaissance man’. Not only lute composer and musician, but also poet, artist and engraver, he seems to have invented the tiorbino, a little octave theorbo; his colourful private life included numerous spells in prison, and a vendetta which left him with a bullet lodged in his foot. On Bellerofonte Castaldi: Battaglia d’amore (Toccata Classics TOCC 0081, rec 2006, 77′) the group Il Furioso and four singers record songs with Castaldi’s own lyrics from his Primo Mazzetto (1623) and an extant Modenese manuscript, plus three theorbo and tiorbino duets from his Capricci (1622); many of these works are première...