Gianluigi Trovesi, Stefano Montanari

Stravaganze consonanti brings together the Italian reedman Gianluigi Trovesi and the baroque violinist and conductor Stefano Montanari, at the head of a period-instrument ensemble. Its fifteen tracks set music by Purcell, Dufay, Trabaci, Buonamente, Falconieri and Josquin beside new pieces by Trovesi and two short pieces made with percussionist Fulvio Maras. The title reverses that of Trabaci's Consonanze stravaganti, which is heard as the third track. The album follows the line of Profumo di violetta, Trovesi's earlier ECM journey through Italian opera, and takes it further back, to the Renaissance and the Baroque.

Trovesi, born in Nembro near Bergamo in 1944, plays piccolo clarinet, alto clarinet and alto saxophone. Montanari, principal violin of the Accademia Bizantina from 1995 to 2012, leads strings, two oboes, bassoon and dulcian, archlute, harpsichord and percussion, with Valeria Montanari at the harpsichord. Maras adds percussion and electronics on the two duo pieces, and Corrado Guarino arranged most of Trovesi's own compositions. The music was recorded in Cremona in January 2014 and mixed at Artesuono in Udine in September 2021, so it reached the public nine years after the sessions.

Some of the early pieces are played close to the original and others are arranged, with Trovesi's clarinet often taking the place of a voice. Three excerpts from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas recur through the programme, running from the jaunty The Witches' Dance to a mournful Dido's Lament. For a While is Trovesi's own piece built around fragments of Purcell's Music for a While, where the ensemble moves easily from written lines into improvising. In Karaib's Berger his alto clarinet and saxophone are looped and layered over Maras's percussion.

In the booklet Montanari writes that Trovesi "grasps the power and refinement of a language that passes in the blink of an eye from Dufay to Purcell". Writing in London Jazz News in 2023, Julian Maynard-Smith found the album "genre fluid, flowing gracefully between adherence to a score and improvisation". Geoff Andrew, in Notes & Observations, heard old music that is still "gloriously alive… and occasionally kicking."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2390, released in February 2023, with a liner note by Montanari in Italian and English.