Baroque pearls

There is a moment, in the early seventeenth century, when instrumental music is not yet entirely fixed. Writing exists, yet it remains open and lives within the freedom of gesture and the invention of the moment.

The sonatas of Dario Castello are a direct testimony to this: fluid pages crossed by sudden contrasts and virtuosic impulses, in which the violin seems to come into being beneath the fingers.

With Johann Heinrich Schmelzer and Philipp Friedrich Böddecker, this language spreads beyond Italy and slowly begins to transform itself. Freedom remains central, yet it starts to welcome new forms, new balances and a different idea of musical construction.

“From improvisation to code” is not merely a title, but a real passage in the history of music: from a language born in the instant to a writing increasingly conscious of its own internal architecture.

Giving voice to this journey are two Ticinese interpreters among the most authoritative in the early music repertoire.

Luca Pianca is among the great protagonists of the rediscovery of the lute on the international stage. Collaborating with leading ensembles and artists, he combines virtuosity of the highest level with a rare rhetorical sensitivity. Within musical dialogue, his role is not that of simple accompaniment, but of a sonic thought constructed in real time, capable of giving direction, tension and breath to every phrase.

Fiorenza De Donatis, on the other hand, restores to the violin the extraordinary expressive freedom of Baroque language. An interpreter capable of moving naturally through different repertoires while always preserving the narrative tension of sound, her violin does not describe but acts: it takes a position, constructs and continuously transforms the musical discourse.

Together they shape a dialogue in which music rediscovers its own origin, not as a fixed and immutable object, but as a shared act renewed in the instant of listening.

The concert takes place in the Church of Sorengo, a small building of Romanesque origin which preserves, almost hidden away, some of the oldest and most precious frescoes in Ticino. Within this intimate space, where time seems to have left still-visible traces, music finds a natural resonance — essential, direct and profoundly alive.

BIOGRAPHIES

Fiorenza de Donatis
Born in Locarno, Fiorenza de Donatis graduated from the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana with Carlo Chiarappa and specialised in Baroque repertoire on period instruments with Lucy van Dael in Amsterdam. Winner of the first absolute prize at the International Early Music Competition in Bruges in 2002, she is concertmaster of I Barocchisti under Diego Fasolis and collaborates with leading ensembles in the early music field, including Accademia Bizantina, Concerto Köln, Europa Galante and Kammerorchester Basel.

Luca Pianca
Born in Lugano, Luca Pianca is one of the most important lutenists on the international scene. Co-founder in 1985 of Il Giardino Armonico, he studied with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and has recorded a vast repertoire, including the complete works for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach. He collaborates regularly with leading performers and ensembles and is appreciated for the richness of his colours, his rhetorical sensitivity and his extraordinary ability to improvise in basso continuo.