Baroque Classical Guitar

The Bach Guitar Duo (Florindo Baldissera and Victorinus Nalato) has a gorgeous album of baroque works, Obstinatum: Chaconnes e Passacalles, on the AlchEmistica netlabel.

The chaconne and passacaglia are types of musical composition first found in the early 1600s in the baroque era in Spain. They were vehicles for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression. Both usually had a bass-line serving a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. The bass-line typically descend stepwise from the tonic to the dominant pitch of the scale while the harmonies emphasize the circle of fifths. The passacaglia is typically based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple meter.

This anthology of passacaglia and chaconnes presented by Bach Guitar Duo features compositions of Germanic nations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The composers include Friedrich Christian Witt (c1660 - 1716), Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (1665-1746), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), and Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706).

Florindo Baldissera plays guitar on higher fourth by Loris Colladon, 2008. Victorinus Nalato plays on guitar by Masaru Kohno, 1981. Recorded in Belluno, Municipal Auditorium, on June 2010.



Location: Venice, Italy
Image: The first page of the autographed manuscript of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, by Johann Sebastian Bach
Music License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported