The “Hellier” 1679 violin and the “Sabionari” 1679 guitar are two wonderful instruments made in the same year by Antonio Stradivari, the greatest violin maker of the history.

The Hellier, a violin of large size and vigorous style, was named after its first, lucky owner, a rich gentleman of British origin who presumedly bought the violin directly from Stradivari. The decoration of the ribs and scroll, made with the technique of inlay filled with mastic of wood paste and glue, is characterised by a phytomorphic design of flowers and buds with animals. The elegant ornamentation on the top and back plates consists of a double inlayed purfling enclosing small ivory or bone lozenges and roundels fixed with mastic of wood and glue.

The Sabionari is one of the five Baroque guitars made by Antonio Stradivari that have survived to date. It was made in 1679 based on the same model used for other two famous guitars: in 1681 for the “Giustiniani” and in 1688 for the “Hill”. According to some sources, the instrument was sold by Stradivari’s descendants to Giovanni Sabionari from Ferrara at the end of the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, it was modified to become a six-string guitar, as it happened to many Baroque guitars, by the maker Giuseppe Marconcini. In 2011, the guitar was restored to its original Baroque configuration with five double strings after the replacement of the parts made by Marconcini.

For this recording, effected in the Auditorium Giovanni Arvedi at Museo del Violino di Cremona, the Hellier violin and Sabionari guitar have been made available on an entirely exceptional basis to two famous Italian artists: Federico Guglielmo and Diego Cantalupi. The exceptional nature of the two instruments, and in particular the wonderful decorations of the Hellier violin, inspired the choice of musical pieces and the title of the CD: Baroque extravagances.

The celebrity that Arcangelo Corelli (Fusignano, 17 February 1653–Rome, 8 January 1713) gained during his life for the value of his work and his virtuosity was such that many seventeenth-century music theorists considered him as an example of perfection. One of them, Angelo Berardi, in 1689 expressed that “The concerts for violin that are most appreciated and valued today are those by Mr. Arcangelo Corelli, famous violinist, known as Il Bolognese, new Orpheus of our time”. Corelli had the rare privilege of being counted, already during his lifetime, among the ‘classics’: Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni, a famous counterpoint expert from Rome, considered him as an extraordinary and extravagant model and defined him a ‘modern classic’.

The situation was not so different beyond the Channel: any eighteenth-century English gentleman who wanted to show his excellent musical taste would mention the work of the renowned Italian violinist, a sublime example as to composition and formal conception. The cult of Corelli that had rapidly spread in England – mainly thanks to the work of some of his Italian pupils including the Cremonese Gasparo Visconti (who curated Corelli’s printed works) – contributed to establish a musical style as a classic for its balance and formal perfection.

On the other hand, England was fertile ground: the Neapolitan guitarist and violinist Nicola Matteis had arrived in London around the 1650s, leaving “as a welcome legacy to the English nation a general appreciation for the Italian taste for harmony, and no one in town had condiments without Italian spices. And local maestros began to imitate him”. Matteis’s music is rooted in folk repertoire and his publications were intended for professional musicians as well as high-level amateurs. Matteis’s works were easily found in pocket edition as it was the case for other books of the same kind including the well-known “The division violin” which contained variations on famous melodies.

In the late seventeenth-century, there were many reasons for taking a ‘study trip’ to Rome: the excellent musical level, a busy concert activity and the presence of important musicians. The barely known figure of Lelio Colista is a case in point: defined as “Rome’s true Orpheus”, he was a teacher of Corelli and had an influence on the style of the English composer Henry Purcell.

Lelio Colista was a theorbo and guitar virtuoso and in this not irrelevant detail may lie the true reason for Gaspar Sanz’s stay in Rome. A clergyman as well as an organist and a skilled guitarist, he owed his fame to a three-volume method for guitar which included a few pieces that were later brought to celebrity in the reworking by the composer Joaquín Rodrigo in his Fantasía para un gentilhombre commissioned by Andrés Segovia. It was probably Gaspar Sanz who exported in Spain the taste for the style of Corelli whom he certainly met in Rome. Some movements from Sonatas op.5 by the composer from Fusignano appear, in fact, in the collection “Pasacalles y obras de guitarra” by Santiago de Murcia, a Spanish guitarist who was teacher of Maria Luisa of Savoy, wife of Philip V of Bourbon.

“Although after Corelli the style of music has much changed and many advancements have been made in the research on harmony, the core of his ideas is still found in the work of modern composers who were able to profit marvellously from the study of his op. 3 and 5”. The English composer Charles Avison thus defined the music of Corelli, an author he was familiar with only due to his studies in London with one of his pupils, Francesco Geminiani, and who for many years to come would remain a strong reference point in the creation of a true musical style in Italy.