Pizzicato
“All this is wonderfully intense and profound in Valerio Losito’s performance”
A five-star review praising Valerio Losito’s intense and profound interpretation of Elvira Muratore’s Alias, Amor.
Read the review ↗ - Pizzicato
Da Vinci Classics
Physical and Digital Release: 6 July 2020
Valerio Losito presents Elvira Muratore's Alias, Amor, exploring five musical chapters through the distinctive resonance and changing colours of the viola d'amore.
13.67€
Digital programme · 5 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Valerio Losito: Baroque violinist and viola d’amore player, pupil of Yvonne Ekman and Enrico Onofri, performs in concerts throughout Europe, America and Japan, both as soloist and as a chamber musician. He has collaborated with major conductors and early music specialists. Since 2006 he plays a Ferdinando Gagliano viola d’amore. Valerio is considered one of the best viola d’amore soloist worldwide of his generation.
Elvira Muratore: Elvira’s works come from the idea of music as experience: nothing to be understood, but simply an experience to be lived. Due to a period of studies in Mathematics, she became extremely fascinated by the idea of Zero or Void, and in particular by the differences and the similarities that can be found in different cultures, and she uses it to build her own musical philosophy.
ALIAS is a contemporary artistic project conceived for the viola d’amore, one of the most distinctive instruments of the Baroque period. Elvira Muratore’s music is entrusted to Valerio Losito and shaped around the warm sound of a viola d’amore made by Ferdinando Gagliano in Naples in 1775, owned by the Elsa Peretti Foundation.
The project also includes artistic photographs by Federica Cocciro. Music and image enter into dialogue, suggesting what remains unspoken and allowing its meaning to emerge without fixing it in words. The name of the instrument itself points towards the project’s central theme: love.
The five musical chapters explore different aspects of love through texts drawn from international literature and poetry: Narciso, Haiku, Amore sacro, Oltre la morte and Vivamus. Their sources include Japanese haiku, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Colloquy of Monos and Una, and Catullus’s fifth poem. Amore sacro is dedicated to Claudio José Boncompagni.
ALIAS thus creates a connection between earthly and spiritual experience, and between a historical instrument and a contemporary musical language. This recording was made possible by the support of the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundations and was recorded in the theatre of the Casa Museo Alberto Sordi in Rome.
Based on the original album booklet. English revised.
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Pizzicato
“All this is wonderfully intense and profound in Valerio Losito’s performance”
A five-star review praising Valerio Losito’s intense and profound interpretation of Elvira Muratore’s Alias, Amor.
Read the review ↗ - PizzicatoTGmusic
An exceptionally enthusiastic appraisal of Muratore’s five-part cycle and Losito’s performance, praising the music’s narrative coherence, expressive intensity and the performer’s command of instrumental colour and dramatic gesture.
Read the review ↗ - TGmusicTGmusic
Muratore discusses her compositional language, her interest in the idea of emptiness, and the collaboration with Valerio Losito that led to Alias, Amor. This is a composer interview rather than an independent review.
Read the interview ↗ - TGmusic
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