Ariosti: 6 Lessons for Viola d'amore & continuo

The violinist, organist, composer and librettist Attilio Malachia Ariosti was born in Bologna in 1666. His career took him to Mantua and Venice, the most enlightened musical and artistic centers of northern Italy at the time, then to Berlin and finally Vienna in 1703. Expelled from the Papal State for moral reasons, by 1716 he was living in London where, together with Bononcini and Handel, he became a permanent composer of the Royal Academy.

His Six Lessons for Viola d'Amore, published in London in 1724 and dedicated to King George, were as the name implies composed expressly to teach violinists to play the viola d'amore. They are written in scordatura with a system of movable keys to indicate the different positions and fingerings of the left hand up to the fourth position.

Ariosti's Cantata for solo voice with the Viola d'amore Pur al fin gentil Viola was probably composed around 1690.

Mauro Righini plays an 18th-century anonymous Bohemian viola d'amore with a bow by Nicolas Léonard Tourte.