Still Life: Early Baroque Fantasy

In the first half of the seventeenth century, music burned with transformative power. It was an age that asked art to wound and to move — that understood sound as a force of nature, able to pierce the soul and carry the listener from sensory experience toward spiritual elevation. Still Life: Early Baroque Fantasy gathers this repertoire and plays it in that spirit. Each work stands, like an object in a baroque still life, in stark relief: a suspended moment in which a single affect is intensified and held, before yielding without transition to the next — a lament giving way to a dance, a recitative to a flight of virtuosity. Binding them is the stylus phantasticus, the "fantastic style" that prized freedom, rhetoric and sudden contrast, and made of every gesture a means of transformation.

The album charts several paths toward that transcendence: the dramatic contrasts of Dario Castello's Venetian sonatas, their continuo rebuilt on the model of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo to restore their theatrical charge; the interplay of sacred and secular, chamber organ and harpsichord, in Buxtehude's trio sonata; the soaring virtuosity of Ignazio Albertini, where the violin, suspended over long pedal points, becomes a vehicle for feeling rather than display; and the meditative brilliance of Gregorio Strozzi's Ancidetemi pur, an elaboration on Arcadelt's madrigal of love and annihilation. In performing these works today, Música d'Outrora seeks to reignite that transformative fire — where each suspended moment pierces through time to wound, transform and elevate the soul, as it first did in the seventeenth century.

The album explores the stylus phantasticus and includes the first recordings of Gregorio Strozzi and Ignazio Albertini alongside sonatas by Castello, Buxtehude and Stradella.