The title of this album refers to the Yiddish word Mensch: literally “a human being,” but in everyday use someone who acts with integrity, awareness and responsibility. For Frederic Rzewski, the term carried exactly this meaning. A Mensch is not a perfect person, but someone  who remains fully human—capable of doubt, contradiction and critical thought, and resistant to becoming passive within larger societal systems.This idea runs quietly but consistently through his work. The pieces brought together here span more than sixty years, from the early 1950s to the last decade of his life, forming a kind of timeline across his career. The musical language changes, sometimes radically, but the underlying concerns remain strikingly constant. Rzewski’s music engages with literature, politics and history, often through concrete  situations—prison, injustice, personal crisis—but never in an abstract or detached way. The question is always how individuals relate to these forces, and whether they can remain human within them. In that sense, the ethical dimension of the Yiddish Mensch is not just a title, but something that can be heard throughout the programme. 

Taken as a whole, this recording traces a composer who never gave up on the idea that music can carry meaning beyond itself. Across decades of work, his voice remains clear in its insistence that art can still ask what it means to live—and to act—as a human being.

Booklet: EN

‘Music from the City of the Spanish Viceroys 
This recording is dedicated to a center of Italian music that is often overlooked: the Milan of the Spanish Habsburgs. After the death of Francesco II in 1532, the Sforza had to cede the Duchy of Milan to the French and ultimately to the Holy Roman Empire. Charles V installed his son Philip II as head of the Spanish Habsburgs and thus the Duchy fell under the rule of a Spanish Viceroy. While the city lost the political importance it had enjoyed under the ruling Visconti and Sforza families, a relative calm between two terrible plagues in 1576 and 1630 promoted a flowering of cultural life under the patronage of archbishop Federico Borromeo.
We present a varied soundscape of Habsburg Milan, both sacred and secular. We explore the uniquely Milanese “canzon-motteto” which places a vocal ensemble in dialogue with instruments, double-choir motets, canzonas, and little-known hyper- expressive madrigals of Francesco Rognoni Taeggio, better known as a violin virtuoso and master of the art of improvised diminution. Music of Giovan Paolo and Andrea Cima, Agostino Soderini, Francesco and Giovanni Domenico Rognoni Taeggio, and Giuseppe Gallo

Booklet: EN, DE, FR

A major figure in early 20th century French music,

Satie continues to inspire many artists today and

remains fascinating for his nonconformity.

“Satie shows us a blank road where everyone is

free to leave their footprints. […] He likes to live

where life is bustling; he has an instinct for good

inns; he enjoys the climate.” With these two sentences,

Cocteau accurately evokes the atmosphere

of this album. Airs à faire fuir, Danses de travers,

Préludes flasques, Profondeur, Effronterie, and

Désespoir agréable, among others, are very much

in the vein of the “white road.” Allons-y Chochotte,

Je te veux, La Diva de l’Empire with guest star

Claron McFadden (soprano) and Gambades allow

us to warmly enjoy the bustling life of the cabarets

of Montmartre. To unexpectedly round off

this album, the booklet reveals an unpublished

text by the exceptional author Caroline Lamarche

dedicated to Monsieur Satie.

Booklet: FR, EN

‘The Sound of Change: Music of the Flamboyant Era
Fire, movement, and transformation lie at the heart of this recording. Flamboyance immerses the listener in the vibrant musical world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Europe’s culture—like its flamboyant Gothic architecture—embraced colour, intensity, and
exuberance. Spanning more than a century, from the early Italian Trecento to the dawn of the Burgundian age, this programme traces how polyphony spread “like wildfire” between north and south, sacred and secular, court and chapel. Motets, chansons, madrigals, dances,
and sacred works by Landini, Ciconia, Du Fay, Binchois, and their contemporaries illustrate an ever-evolving repertoire in which devotion and passion, intellect and pomp coexist.
Performed by the Sollazzo Ensemble, expanded to twenty singers and instrumentalists, this music is presented in a manner reminiscent of princely banquets and ceremonial contexts. Rather than treating the late Middle Ages as a distant historical epoch, the recording invites
listeners to experience these sounds as a living, vibrant musical world.

Booklet: NL,FR, EN, DE

New Passacaille release – April 2026

After more than forty years devoted to the study of Antonio Vivaldi’s sources and the reconstruction of his catalogue (RV), conductor and musicologist Federico Maria Sardelli presents a major rediscovery: La Costanza trionfante degl’amori, e de gl’odii (RV 706-A), a long-lost opera now partially restored and recorded with Modo Antiquo for Passacaille.

Through years of archival investigation and philological work, Sardelli has traced, identified and reconstructed eighteen arias from the score, representing approximately half of the original opera. This painstaking effort sheds new light on Vivaldi’s theatrical production at the height of his creative maturity and restores to the repertoire a work considered lost for more than three centuries.

A leading authority on Vivaldi, Sardelli has played a central role in redefining modern understanding of the composer’s operatic output. His long-term engagement with the sources—combining scholarship, performance practice and editorial work—forms the foundation of this project, which stands as both a musicological achievement and a living artistic reconstruction.

Recorded in July 2025 at the Oratorio di San Francesco in Florence, the album brings together the period ensemble Modo Antiquo and an international cast including Cecilia Molinari (mezzo-soprano), Valeria La Grotta (soprano), Valentino Buzza (tenor) and Biagio Pizzuti (bass), under Sardelli’s direction. The recording offers the first modern performance of this substantial fragment, built largely from unpublished arias, and opens a new perspective on Vivaldi’s dramatic language and expressive range.

Originally staged at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice as the final opera of the 1715–1716 Carnival season—most likely towards the end of January 1716—La Costanza trionfante degl’amori, e de gl’odii quickly established itself as one of the most successful works associated with Vivaldi’s early operatic career. The libretto by Antonio Marchi, resident poet at several Venetian theatres from 1692 onwards, became one of his most celebrated texts, its dissemination closely tied to the circulation of Vivaldi’s music.

The opera’s success led to numerous revivals and adaptations across Europe well into the 1730s, including productions in Munich, Venice, Vicenza, Hamburg, Mantua and Prague under various titles and reworkings. This widespread circulation attests to the work’s enduring theatrical appeal and cultural impact far beyond its Venetian origins.

This new release represents the culmination of Sardelli’s lifelong engagement with Vivaldi: a project that bridges scholarship and performance, and that allows modern audiences to encounter, for the first time, a substantial fragment of a once-celebrated opera now returned to the sound world for which it was conceived.

Booklet: EN, IT

In this recording, Stefano Albarello revives fourteen of those odes, reconstructed from ancient neumatic notation, together with a unique melody from Terence’s Eunuchus.

“Vocem cum cithara dedit” reveals a forgotten world where Latin verse, rhythm, and melody merged — the living echo of antiquity resonating through the Middle Ages.

Booklet: EN, IT

Zanasi and Díaz-Latorre reveal how innovative Caccini’s nobile sprezzatura di canto truly was: a free, speech-like, rhetorically shaped way of singing in which the emotional power of the text directly guides the musical gesture. In their hands, poetry and melody intertwine as a single expressive line, exactly as Caccini and the Florentine Camerata envisioned.

Each track draws the listener into a vivid sonic world where the timeless beauty and bold innovation of the early Baroque come alive, offering a fresh and deeply felt perspective on a pivotal moment in music history—an compelling listening experience for all lovers of early music.

Booklet: EN

Franz Liszt was a composer who constantly revisited and reimagined his own works, leaving behind multiple versions that reveal his evolving artistry. His 12 Grandes Études (S. 137), later transformed into the Études d’exécution transcendante (S. 139), exemplify this creative process. Originating from his earlier Étude en douze exercices (1826), these studies chart Liszt’s growth from prodigy to visionary, pushing pianistic and harmonic boundaries. Far beyond displays of technique, these Études embody a fusion of profound musical thought and extreme technical demands—one reason they remain rarely recorded. This new recording, the first ever on a historical instrument, brings fresh insight into one of Liszt’s most daring achievements.

Booklet: EN, DE, FR

Conversations and music lasting into the early morning hours: this is likely how one must imagine the evening of August 17, 1722, at the residence of Rudolf Franz Erwein von Schönborn in Wiesentheid Castle.

“They remained until five o’clock in the morning and then departed,” the count reported the next day to his brother, the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, who had sent him his court musicians. They came from Italy, and had among them the outstanding oboist Giovanni Benedetto Platti.

Together with Clara Blessing, her ensemble recreates this special evening of music-making among friends (Unter Freunden) with Italian-German masterworks of the eighteenth century

Booklet: EN, DE

Spiegelungen brings together Bach’s Musical Offering, Viktor Kalabis’ Canonic Inventions, and Isang Yun’s Royal Theme in a striking dialogue across time and culture. At the heart lies the canon: for Bach, a demonstration of contrapuntal mastery; for Kalabis, a modern exploration of invention and expressive freedom; for Yun, a meditation shaped by Taoist philosophy and Korean sonorities, refracted through the European tradition. NeoBarock performs on period instruments, creating a vibrant sound world where intellectual rigor meets poetic resonance. By placing them in dialogue, NeoBarock invites listeners to hear timeless ideas mirrored and transformed — a resonance between past and present that illuminates both.

Booklet: EN, DE, FR