Angelo Michele Bartolotti Suite D minor VI Passacaglie

Описание: bmn20154

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«questo mio modo di sonare» – Angelo Michele Bartolotti and the high art of Baroque guitar
Angelo Michele Bartolotti was already recognized as an outstanding guitarist and theorbo player by his contemporaries. We can still understand why today, because his Secondo Libro di
Chitarra in particular demands a technique on the Baroque guitar that is at once stupendous yet highly refined, and of a kind that we only find much later in the published works of other guitarists.
Bartolotti is also candid about this degree of difficulty in his preface «Al Lettore» to this Secondo Libro: «Quantunque questo mio modo di sonare sia stato da alcuni biasimato per difficile
…» («Although some people complain that my manner of playing is difficult …»). Nevertheless, from what we can reconstruct of his biography – of which we know only the broad contours
– he was very successful.
This quite special music ideally should be played on a special instrument. For this recording we were able to use the only extant playable guitar by Antonio Stradivari from Cremona (1648/9-
1737), which with its date of 1679 is also the oldest extant guitar by this maker. Although Stradivari is today known almost exclusively for his violins and violas, he made all the string instruments
that were in use in his day, such as viols, harps, lute, mandolins and also guitars (as here). Our so-called Sabionari guitar is named after its first-known owner, who was mentioned in a
letter by a dealer in 1854, but of whom we have no further biographical information. Like many Baroque guitars, this instrument too was converted from a five-course Baroque guitar into a
six-course guitar, with the original neck being completely replaced by a new, shorter neck and the beams inside changed too. This modified instrument was shown to the famous guitarist Andres
Segovia at the X Convegno Chitarristico in Bologna in 1948. The back of the instrument was detached at this time, as we can see because Segovia wrote on it himself: «Due secoli più tarde /
A.Segovia Bologna 1948» («Two centuries later…», presumably referring – albeit somewhat inaccurately – to the time that had elapsed since Stradivari’s death).