Dialogoi [Διάλογοι]: Johann Sebastian Bach reworked by Carlo Maria Barile

Carlo Maria Barile was born in Ferrara in 1989. He studied piano and drums at Il Pentagramma music school in Bari. In 2007 he received a scholarship to attend the Five Week Summer Performance Program at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. After completing his secondary education with top marks, he graduated with honours in organ performance and composition from the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory in Bari, where he studied with Margherita Quarta.

In 2011 he completed the Konzertexamen in organ at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany, studying with Tomasz Adam Nowak and receiving the grade sehr gut. In 2016 he obtained a second-level master’s degree with honours in early music at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples under Antonio Florio. He continued his studies with teachers including Thomaskirche organist Ullrich Böhme, Naji Hakim and Ton Koopman.

His solo appearances as a classical organist and harpsichordist and as a jazz pianist have taken him to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Steinway Hall and St. Peter’s Church in New York City; Toledo Cathedral and the Iglesia del Salvador in Granada, Spain; the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari; Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris; and the Basilica of Valère in Sion, Switzerland. He has also performed at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the Lambertikirche in Münster and the Markuskirche in Munich.

As a continuo player with Cappella Neapolitana, conducted by Antonio Florio, he has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Muziekcentrum De Bijloke in Ghent, Belgium, and the auditorium at Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples. At the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, he took part in the first modern performance of Giovanni Maria Trabaci’s Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Matthaeum, conducted by Rosario Totaro.

He played harmonium in Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle with the Ghislieri Choir & Consort, conducted by Giulio Prandi, at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta. Organised by the Teatru Manoel, the performance marked the 150th anniversary of Rossini’s death. His teaching work has included piano and music theory at Il Pentagramma in Bari.

Coffee Street Trio brings together Carlo Maria Barile on piano, Vito Di Modugno on bass and double bass, and Michele Di Monte on drums. Barile formed the ensemble with his former teachers, and the group takes its name from Di Modugno’s composition Coffee Street.

For Manhattan Suite… and Other Stories, recorded in Bari in August 2018 and released by Da Vinci Jazz, the trio presents Barile’s musical portrait of New York in a new setting that combines jazz with elements of classical music. The programme also includes Barile’s All the Things… I Am and Di Modugno’s Coffee Street.

Michele Di Monte began studying drums at an early age. Following his classical studies, he explored new approaches to the instrument through experimentation and exchanges with drummers from Italy and abroad.

His work as a session drummer has encompassed concerts and studio recordings with his own bands and collaborations with musicians including Irio De Paula, Tony Scott, Urbie Green, Joy Garrison and Crystal White.

His teaching of drums and music theory at Il Pentagramma music school in Bari began in 1986.

Born in Bari, Italy, Vito Di Modugno has been included among the leading organists in DownBeat magazine’s poll. He began studying music at an early age with his father, the accordionist Pino Di Modugno, and went on to study piano, organ, electric bass and double bass.

He has appeared as an organ soloist with the Arturo Toscanini Symphony Orchestra of Parma in Jon Lord’s concerto for group and orchestra, based on the work first performed by Deep Purple in 1969. He has also been invited to perform in the United States with saxophonists Jerry Bergonzi and Carol Sudhalter.

The Italian magazine Musica Jazz included him among the Hammond organ specialists featured in its supplement and accompanying CD devoted to the instrument’s history. He has received Jazzit magazine’s award for Best Italian Organist on several occasions.

His teaching work has included the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory in Bari, the E. R. Duni Conservatory in Matera and Il Pentagramma music school in Bari. He has also given jazz masterclasses in Espartinas, near Seville, Spain.

Carlo Maria Barile was born in Ferrara in 1989. He studied piano and drums at Il Pentagramma music school in Bari. In 2007 he received a scholarship to attend the Five Week Summer Performance Program at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. After completing his secondary education with top marks, he graduated with honours in organ performance and composition from the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory in Bari, where he studied with Margherita Quarta.

In 2011 he completed the Konzertexamen in organ at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany, studying with Tomasz Adam Nowak and receiving the grade sehr gut. In 2016 he obtained a second-level master’s degree with honours in early music at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples under Antonio Florio. He continued his studies with teachers including Thomaskirche organist Ullrich Böhme, Naji Hakim and Ton Koopman.

His solo appearances as a classical organist and harpsichordist and as a jazz pianist have taken him to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Steinway Hall and St. Peter’s Church in New York City; Toledo Cathedral and the Iglesia del Salvador in Granada, Spain; the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari; Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris; and the Basilica of Valère in Sion, Switzerland. He has also performed at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the Lambertikirche in Münster and the Markuskirche in Munich.

As a continuo player with Cappella Neapolitana, conducted by Antonio Florio, he has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Muziekcentrum De Bijloke in Ghent, Belgium, and the auditorium at Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples. At the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in Naples, he took part in the first modern performance of Giovanni Maria Trabaci’s Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Matthaeum, conducted by Rosario Totaro.

He played harmonium in Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle with the Ghislieri Choir & Consort, conducted by Giulio Prandi, at St. Paul’s Pro-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta. Organised by the Teatru Manoel, the performance marked the 150th anniversary of Rossini’s death. His teaching work has included piano and music theory at Il Pentagramma in Bari.

Johann Sebastian Bach: (b Eisenach, 21 March 1685, d Leipzig; 28 July 1750). Composer and organist. The most important member of the family, his genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful and original inventiveness, technical mastery and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. While it was in the former capacity, as a keyboard virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that by the end of the 18th century earned him a unique historical position. His musical language was distinctive and extraordinarily varied, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading on to new perspectives which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.
The first authentic posthumous account of his life, with a summary catalogue of his works, was put together by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil J.F. Agricola soon after his death and certainly before March 1751 (published as Nekrolog, 1754). J.N. Forkel planned a detailed Bach biography in the early 1770s and carefully collected first-hand information on Bach, chiefly from his two eldest sons; the book appeared in 1802, by when the Bach Revival had begun and various projected collected editions of Bach’s works were underway; it continues to serve, together with the 1754 obituary and the other 18th-century documents, as the foundation of Bach biography.