The Organ in Italy in Renaissance and Baroque

The instrument, the music, the performer, the audience: these elements together form a cyclical bond which in the last decades has transformed the practice and consumption of organ music in Europe, particularly in Italy.
The rediscovery of the importance of historical organs, the cataloguing of the instruments, the improved quality of restorations, and the increasing number of concerts and recordings, all have contributed to a growing interest in the study and publication of keyboard literature specifically intended for historical instruments.
Moreover, they have led to new directions in the specialized training of performers, and a slow but progressive interest on the part of audiences in the timbres of historical instruments and in a repertoire which, thanks to a new generation of performers, may now be fully appreciated.
On this recording, two historical organs from northeast Italy illustrate, through their sound structure and timbre, both the continuity and the transformation of taste and language in organ music which occurred over the course of almost two centuries.
A few decades after the building of the Callido organ in Venzone, the history of Italian organs would undergo a rapid change in tastes, increasingly moving away from earlier long-standing traditions.