Girolamo Giacobbi: L'Aurora Ingannata, Dramatodia
Same artist
Da Vinci Classics
Alessandra Bottai, Armonia delle Sfere, Daniele Salvatore, Monica Pellicciari, Perikli Pite, Silvia Rambaldi
13.67€
Digital programme · 11 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Daniele Salvatore is a flautist, recorder player, composer and researcher. He earned diplomas in flute, composition, choral music and choral conducting, and recorder, studying with F. Di Tommaso, A. Samorì, T. Gotti and G. Pacchioni. His further training included work with Severino Gazzelloni, Michele Ancillotti and Giacomo Manzoni, and Ennio Morricone’s film-music course at the Accademia Chigiana.
As a recorder player with Charivari Ensemble, he won first prizes at the international competitions in Stresa in 1985 and Tradate in 1986. His compositions have received awards and performances internationally, including recognition for Missa Reservata at Loreto in 1993 and One, Two, Three, Four in the American Waging Peace Through Singing competition in 2002.
He combines performing with musicological research, preparing editions of music by Nicolò Corradini and Giovanni Cavaccio and a critically annotated revision of Silvestro Ganassi’s Fontegara. His recordings and concert projects with Charivari Ensemble and Armonia delle Sfere explore Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. He has taught composition, harmony, counterpoint and recorder in Italian conservatories, including Bologna, and plays Baroque flute on Armonia delle Sfere’s recording of Paisiello’s Flute Quartets, Op. 23.
Alessandra Bottai is a violinist whose recorded work includes Giovanni Paisiello’s Flute Quartets, Op. 23 with Armonia delle Sfere. Recorded in Sorrivoli di Roncofreddo in July 2014, the project brings together Baroque flute, violin, viola, cello and harpsichord continuo. Bottai performs alongside Daniele Salvatore, Monica Pellicciari, Perikli Pite and Silvia Rambaldi.
Armonia delle Sfere is an ensemble founded in Bologna by Daniele Salvatore and Silvia Rambaldi. It brings together musicians working in the fields of Renaissance and Baroque music. Its collaborators have included the singers Miho Kamiya, Santina Tomasello and Gloria Banditelli, the lutenist Stefano Rocco, the cellist Mauro Valli, and Perikli Pite on cello and viola da gamba.
The ensemble began performing in 2009, when it was invited to present Handel’s complete recorder sonatas at the Gorizia Classica Festival. Its flexible instrumentation ranges from a trio, with cello, viola da gamba or theorbo added to the continuo, to groups of four or five performers, often including a singer. As a trio, it has performed Francesco Mancini’s complete Twelve Sonatas for recorder and basso continuo. Other programmes combine singers and instrumentalists and have marked anniversaries associated with Handel, Scarlatti and Pasquini.
Armonia delle Sfere has appeared at the Bach Festival in Rimini, the Marco Scacchi Festival in Gallese, the Early Music Festival in Salerno, the San Giacomo Festival in Bologna, Gorizia Classica and the Sagra Malatestiana in Rimini, among other festivals and concert series.
On Giovanni Paisiello: Flute Quartets Op. 23 (Da Vinci Classics, C00003), the ensemble comprises Daniele Salvatore, Baroque flute; Alessandra Bottai, violin; Monica Pellicciari, viola; Perikli Pite, cello; and Silvia Rambaldi, harpsichord.
Monica Pellicciari is a violist whose performances encompass early music and the Classical repertoire. She plays viola on Armonia delle Sfere’s recording of Giovanni Paisiello’s Flute Quartets, Op. 23 for Da Vinci Classics.
Her concert appearances include Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at Vicenza in Lirica in 2017, where she performed on viola da braccio, and a programme of Galuppi concertos and Mozart divertimentos with I Musicali Affetti at the Hermans Festival in August 2026.
Perikli Pite is a cellist and viola da gamba player. He began his musical training at the artistic lyceum in Tirana, where he also studied composition, and continued at Tirana’s Academy of Fine Arts with H. Hoxha. After moving to Italy, he graduated with honours from the Conservatorio “G. Rossini” in Pesaro in 1998 and studied viola da gamba with Roberto Gini in Parma.
His further training included courses in Città di Castello, Saludecio, Venice and Milan. He received scholarships from the Fondazione Gioacchino Rossini, the Cecilia Ugolini Paci programme and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. In 2004, as cellist of Recitar Cantando, he shared the ensemble’s first prize at the “D. Caravita” early-music competition in Fusignano.
His work has included performances with opera institutions in Macerata, Parma, Sassari and Ancona, and collaborations with Europa Galante, La Calandria, Recitar Cantando and Jeanne Loriod. With Armonia delle Sfere he performs on cello and viola da gamba; on the Da Vinci Classics recording of Paisiello’s Flute Quartets, Op. 23, he plays cello.
Silvia Rambaldi is a harpsichordist, clavichord player and specialist in basso continuo. After studying piano, she graduated with honours in harpsichord from the Conservatorio “G. B. Martini” in Bologna and pursued further continuo studies with Jesper Christensen. She has taught harpsichord, clavichord, continuo and improvisation at conservatories in Campobasso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Bologna.
Her teaching has also included masterclasses at the University of Ferrara, the Malmö Academy of Music, ESMAE in Porto, and the conservatories of Cosenza and Campobasso. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed in Italy and internationally, including Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Japan and France, and has recorded for RAI and Japan’s NHK.
Alongside performing, she undertakes musicological research and work on historical dance. Her collaborations include Concerto segreto, devoted to the late-Renaissance madrigal repertoire of Ferrara, and Armonia delle Sfere, with which she recorded Paisiello’s Flute Quartets, Op. 23 for Da Vinci Classics.
Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) was an Italian composer whose operas helped shape European musical theatre in the late eighteenth century. Born in Taranto, he trained at the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio in Naples before receiving his first operatic commissions in Bologna in 1764.
He returned to Naples in 1766, writing comic operas for the Teatro Nuovo and Teatro dei Fiorentini as well as serious works for the Teatro di San Carlo. From 1776 to 1784, he served Catherine II in St Petersburg, where he composed Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782). His music was performed widely across Europe.
After returning to Italy, Paisiello continued his career at the Neapolitan court. Among his best-known works are La serva padrona, Il re Teodoro in Venezia and Nina, o sia La pazza per amore. In 1802 he moved to Paris to direct Napoleon’s chapel, returning to Naples in 1804.
Alongside his operas, he wrote sacred music, keyboard concertos and chamber works. His instrumental music reveals the same lyrical clarity and sensitivity to musical dialogue that distinguish his writing for the stage.
ALBUM NOTES BY DANIELE SALVATORE In Italy, scrittura a quattro—writing in four parts—became established with the concerto of the late seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century it developed in several directions: the concertino a quattro of composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Battista Sammartini and Giuseppe Tartini; the sonate a quattro of Tomaso Albinoni and Francesco Durante; and certain symphonies by Alessandro Scarlatti, intended to be played senza cimbalo, without harpsichord, and characterised by rigorous imitation between the four parts. The genre gained particular prominence with the emergence of the…
In Italy, scrittura a quattro—writing in four parts—became established with the concerto of the late seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century it developed in several directions: the concertino a quattro of composers such as Baldassare Galuppi, Giovanni Battista Sammartini and Giuseppe Tartini; the sonate a quattro of Tomaso Albinoni and Francesco Durante; and certain symphonies by Alessandro Scarlatti, intended to be played senza cimbalo, without harpsichord, and characterised by rigorous imitation between the four parts.
The genre gained particular prominence with the emergence of the quartet in the 1760s, as basso continuo gradually gave way to new approaches and sonata form became increasingly widespread. In Paris and Vienna, the new form brought contrasting tendencies into coexistence: the homophony of the galant style and the contrapuntal traditions that remained deeply rooted in Viennese musical life. Fugal elements consequently appeared in sonata-form developments, while a fugue could also serve as a quartet’s final movement.
The 1770s brought further changes to this early variety of musical language. A more “serene” harmony often replaced conventional polyphonic passages, and the principal melody was increasingly assigned to the highest part. Publishers helped drive this move towards simplicity, seeking to reach a larger market. The demand for accessible music encouraged a simplification of the writing and of its technical demands on performers.
These publishing requirements favoured the galant style and the widespread appearance of quartets in only two movements, including those written by Giuseppe Maria Cambini after 1777 and works by Boccherini and Paisiello. The Adagio could give way to movements with gentler character indications such as amoroso or grazioso, reflecting a simplification of expressive contrasts. Another Parisian development was the quartetto concertante, in which the four instruments exchanged melodic material on more equal terms; it had spread to England before 1780.
Against this background we should consider Giovanni Paisiello’s six flute quartets. Paisiello (Taranto, 9 May 1740 – Naples, 5 June 1816) is best known for his comic operas and less widely recognised as a composer of instrumental music. The quartet for flute and strings was one of the most distinctive ensembles of the Classical period. It developed alongside the string quartet, attracting composers, publishers and amateur flautists eager for new repertoire. Some collections offered interchangeable parts for violin, flute or oboe for commercial reasons, but many composers wrote specifically for this ensemble: Cimarosa, Giordani, Hoffmeister, Krommer, Stamitz, Toeschi, Devienne, Pleyel, Viotti, Abel, Johann Christian Bach and, above all, Mozart, whose four quartets remain central to the repertoire.
Paisiello’s six quartets appeared in two undated editions with different French titles. The edition used for this recording was published at Brunswick, now Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony, roughly halfway between Hamburg and Dresden. In the 1730s the city had been a particularly important German centre for operas on Metastasio’s texts. The score’s title is Six quatuors pour flûte, violon, viola & violoncelle composés par M° Paisiello, Oeuvre XXIII. The existence of two editions testifies to the composer’s reputation beyond Naples and Italy, where he lived and worked for much of his life. His international standing is also evident in Napoleon Bonaparte’s interest in his music: Napoleon mentioned Paisiello in one of his literary ventures and invited him to Paris, where the composer served as maître de chapelle from 1802 to 1804, while declining other appointments.
In 1776, during Paisiello’s journey north, L’avaro deluso was performed in Dresden, further evidence of his reputation in northern Germany. The publication of the quartets may belong to this period. Braunschweig and nearby Wolfenbüttel had long played an important part in German musical life. Five of the six quartets have two movements; the last has only one. They use an accessible but elegant musical language, with memorable melodies and straightforward development.
The keys suit the eighteenth-century transverse flute and do not demand exceptional technical virtuosity. Even towards the end of the century, many flutes still had only one or two keys and remained close to Baroque models. In this recording, the six quartets are performed with harpsichord continuo, although the printed score does not specify that instrument.
This choice has a historical rationale. The second volume of the Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, published in Paris in 1811, reports that Paisiello composed twelve quartets for two violins, viola and harpsichord in Milan for Maria Beatrice d’Este, wife of Ferdinand of Austria. Nine survive as string quartets, with an unfigured bass assigned to the cello. Working back from this evidence, one may propose that the bass in Op. 23 could also be realised on the harpsichord.
Flute quartets with figured bass offer further precedents. These include the Six Quatuor à Flute, Violon, Alto & Basse, published by Hummel in Amsterdam before 1782 as Op. 5 under the name “Giuseppe Haydn”, and Johann Christian Bach’s Six Quatuor à une Flute, Violon, Alto et Basse, issued by the same publisher as oeuvre huitième. In both collections, the bass part carries figures for continuo realisation. Paisiello himself wrote six concertos for harpsichord and orchestra and also used the instrument with violin accompaniment. His Regole per bene accompagnare il partimento, written during his time in St Petersburg between 1781 and 1783, remind us that continuo playing remained a skill to be learned and mastered even as musical practice changed.
Notes by Daniele Salvatore. Translation by Marco Beccari; English revised for this page.
Armonia delle Sfere: Daniele Salvatore, Baroque flute; Alessandra Bottai, violin; Monica Pellicciari, viola; Perikli Pite, cello; Silvia Rambaldi, harpsichord.
Recorded on 28–30 July 2014 at Casa dell’Upupa / Laboratorio Ilario Fioravanti, Sorrivoli di Roncofreddo, Italy. Project created and coordinated by Daniele Salvatore. Digital recording: Roberto Amalfitani. Editing: Creative Mastering, Stefano Cappelli. Cover artwork: Ilario Fioravanti. The recording was made possible by the support of Marco Boschetti, Enrico Gatti, Remo Diego Salvatore, Federico Sardelli and Santina Tomasello.
Design, art direction and production: Osaka Mozart Association, which owns the copyright in the sound recording and artwork.
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