c. 1696–1730, Italian Vinci studied at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo in Naples between 1708 and 1718, and afterwards made his operatic debut with Lo cecato fauzo (‘The False Blind Man’, 1719). He proceeded to dominate operatic life in Naples, and his Li zite ’ngalera (‘The Lovers on the Galley’, 1722) is the earliest extant comic ...
1694–1744, Italian Leo was born near Brindisi, studied music in Naples at the Conservatorio San Maria della Pietà dei Turchini, and spent most of the rest of his life in the city. He held various organist and church music positions, and his first opera, Il pisistrato (1714), was staged before he was 20 years old. In ...
1681–1767, German Telemann was born in Magdeburg, and created his first opera at the age of 12, in which he sang the title role and organized its informal performance in the street. Telemann was influenced by the operas he heard at the Brunswick court and Berlin. He attended university in Leipzig, and became the director of the ...
c. 1704–c. 1760, Italian Carestini studied in Milan from the age of 12, and gave his debut there in 1719. He studied with Antonio Maria Bernacchi, and sang alongside his teacher in his Roman debut of Alessandro Scarlatti’s La Griselda (1721). He spent most of the 1720s singing in operas by Leonardo Vinci (c. 1696–1730), Porpora and Hasse ...
More sophisticated diplomatic relations between states in the late Baroque era resulted in a time of relative peace – for a short period at least – during which the arts flourished. As in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras, writers, artists and musicians turned to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome for their standards and their inspiration. At ...
As part of the Renaissance (literally ‘rebirth’), which began in Italy in around 1450, the Baroque era was a revolution within a revolution. It saw a break from the Medieval view of humanity as innately sinful. Instead, Renaissance thinking cast individuals as a dynamic force in their own right and gave free rein to human imagination, ingenuity and ...
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...
‘Renaissance’ is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’. It has been used since the nineteenth century to describe the period between c. 1300 and 1600. Three hundred years is a long time for a single historical or cultural period, and the strain shows in any attempt to define the term ‘Renaissance’. The cultural phenomenon central to the Renaissance was a revival ...
During the early eighteenth century a few composers enjoyed regular close collaboration with a favourite librettist, such as Fux with Pariati, or both Vinci and Porpora with the young Metastasio. However, such examples were rare, and instead it was common for a popular libretto created for one major Italian opera centre to be adapted for the needs ...
Bass Drum The dominant feature of every military band is its big bass drum. Throughout the history of percussion instruments, this drum has been the mainstay of time-keeping, whether it is used for a marching army or in a late-twentieth century heavy metal band. Early versions of the bass drum (it was certainly known in Asia around 3500 BC) ...
active 1719–40, Italian The exceptional soprano Strada is known to have sung in Vivaldi’s La verità in cimento (‘The Truth Tested’, 1720) in Venice in 1721. Between 1724 and 1726 she sang for Vinci, Porpora and Leo at Naples, where she also married the theatre manager Aurelio del Pò. She arrived in London in 1729, where she ...
(Clarinet, b. 1923) Buddy DeFranco (Boniface Ferdinand Leonardo) became the leading clarinet player of the post-swing era. His liquid sonority and flowing improvisations drew on elements from both swing and bebop, but without settling fully in either camp. He served a big-band apprenticeship with Gene Krupa, Charlie Barnet and Tommy Dorsey in the mid-1940s, but is best ...
1710–36, Italian Pergolesi died at a tragically young age, but he produced a substantial corpus of works during his brief yet intense six-year career. In the 1720s he studied in Naples with teachers including Francesco Durante (1684–1755) and Vinci, but his first opera, La Salustia (1732), was a failure due to the death of the star castrato ...
1678–1729, Italian Haym was the skilful literary adaptor who prepared several of Handel’s best opera libretti, including Radamisto, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Rather than writing new texts for Handel, Haym’s talent was reorganizing old Italian texts so that they were adequately dramatic and balanced while also reducing the amount of simple recitative for ...
1673–1732, Italian Nicolo Grimaldi, known as ‘Nicolini’, studied singing in Naples with the composer Francesco Provenzale (1624–1704), and made his debut at the age of 12. Nicolini sang in the cathedral and royal chapel as a soprano, but soon became associated with operas by Scarlatti. He also sang for Bononcini, Lotti, Leo, Porpora and Vinci. ...
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