A new recording of Paganini’s eccentric ‘diary of invention’ for guitar by a young Italian musician with a fast-growing reputation in both rock and classical genres.
Giacomo Carletti took up the guitar at the age of 13, initially playing electric. Impressed by his talent, the composer Edoardo Catemario encouraged Carletti to take up the classical guitar. He now makes his career as a busy recitalist with the classical instrument while keeping up his pop and rock connections by playing electric guitar in several bands.

As is the case with so many 18th-century composers, Giuseppe Sarti (1727–1802) enjoyed fame in his lifetime to rival W.A. Mozart’s but is scarcely known today. Some might remember him as the author of the aria “Come un agnello”, borrowed by Mozart in Don Giovanni. After all, Sarti’s arias were in his lifetime regarded as true models of Italian style. Even after his death, they were regularly performed in the salons of the nobility. But by about 1840 the memory of the man and his works had largely faded. In recent decades, however, there has been a renewed focus on Sarti; not only for his compositions, but also for his merits as a pedagogue and theorist.

This recital offers a fine mix of Bach’s organ works, at larger and smaller scales, on the renowned historical instrument made by Alsatian organ builder Johann Andreas Silbermann of Strasbourg, a master of French baroque organ construction. It follows in a distinguished line of recordings of Bach made in the extraordinary acoustic of the Arlesheim Cathedral, by such luminaries as Walter Kraft, Karl Richter and Lionel Rogg.