The musical pearls from our new album Hidden Gems are imbued with remarkable facts and background stories. The second work we highlight is ‘Introduzione Teatrale’ by Pietro Locatelli. Recently we published the video on this track made by Bowie Verschuuren during our Hidden Gems tour in may.
In 2012/13, Calefax devoted a concert program to foreign composers who settled in the Netherlands throughout the centuries. The idea for this theme came from bass clarinetist Jelte Althuis. ‘The Dutch are proud of their influence on the rest of the world, but my focus was just the opposite: the influence of foreign composers on musical life in the Netherlands.
While researching repertoire for this programme, I stumbled across this piece by Pietro Locatelli, the Italian composer who made Amsterdam his adopted home. What a discovery! It was an obvious choice as the opening number for that program, and now for this CD.’
At the apex of his career as a traveling violin virtuoso, Locatelli (1695-1764) settled in Amsterdam in 1729, where he taught violin, ran a music publishing house, imported Italian violin strings and conducted an orchestra, whose repertoire included his own works. He died at his home, Prinsengracht 506, in 1764.