Gervasio / Zigiotti / Valgimigli - Sonatas for Mandolino & Basso [CD]

About Giovan Battista Gervasio's life we have only a few, fragmentary pieces of information. We do not know the exact years or places of his birth or death, and can only surmise that he was born in Naples in the third decade of the eighteenth century, and that he died after 1786, year of the publication of the last printed composition of his that is available to us. The music recorded here is a performance of the six sonatas in manuscript form preserved in Uppsala and Paris, the complete corpus of Gervasio's currently known sonatas. The InchordisTrio has been performing Giovan Battista Gervasio's sonatas for mandolin and basso continuo since it's establishment, including them in it's concert programmes. It is a very interesting, sometimes even surprising, music. In spite of it's rough formal simplicity, it turns out to be particularly effective and able to evoke the eighteenth-century Neapolitan Baroque atmosphere, through a series of stylistic features that belong to the typically Neapolitan composition procedure, with melodic solutions that are enjoyable, captivating, and pleasantly engrossing for both listeners and performers. The structure of the InchordisTrio, which is formed exclusively of plucked string instruments, stimulates a performance research and a rather distinctive construction of the basso continuo, based on an alternation of accompanying instruments, of empty and full parts, of timbres, and also on little melodic exchanges between the mandolin, the archlute and the harpsichord.