Costanzi: Cello Symphonies

With one album of cello sonatas by Giovanni Battista Costanzi behind him, Giovanni Sollima has decided to provide further proof of how Costanzi has hitherto been a woefully neglected but exciting compositional voice from that nebulous period between Baroque and Classical. With this new release of Sinfonie per violoncello from Glossa, Sollima demonstrates once more the melodic inventiveness and harmonic liberty to which Costanzi was given together with a virtuoso's capacity to relish the technical demands imposed by a Roman musician who was clearly also a star player on the instrument himself. Together with the Arianna Art Ensemble Sollima has recorded five sinfonias for clelo and contiuo, and a sonata for two cellos by Costanzi where he is joined once again by Monka Leskovar. If the four-movement sonata da chiesa structure favored by Corelli is still apparent in some of these sinfonias, there is a greater openess to the galante style and influences coming from elsewhere in Europe and from across Italy, for all that Costanzi may have no ventured far outside the Eternal City. A new composition by Sollima himself - another cellist-composer - takes off from Costanzi's almost programmatic Sonata for two cellos, "ad uso di corni da caccia".