José Miguel Moreno - Johann Gottfried Conradi: Neue Lauten Stucke (1724) (2013)

Given his absence in recent years from the studios, it is a pleasure to announce a new recording from that dexterous musical intelligence that is José Miguel Moreno; and so soon too after his album devoted to the music of David Kellner. Again we are in unknown territory – German and Bohemian lute music from around the start of the 18th century – and again with Moreno as a trusty guide playing his self-built 11-course Baroque lute.

1724 marked the date of publication in Frankfurt an der Oder of the Neue Lauten Stücke by one Johann Gottfried Conradi, possibly a scion of a notable German family of composers of the time. 1721 saw the death of the aristocratic Jan Antonín Losy, a Bohemian lutenist greatly admired by his contemporaries (including by that towering figure of the instrument, Silvius Leopold Weiss, who dedicated to Losy a heartfelt Tombeau).

The surviving output of both these barely-known figures of the Baroque solo lute music tradition is small but José Miguel Moreno presents three exemplary suites full of improvisatory preludes and characterful dance movements (Courantes, Gigues, Sarabandes, Minuets...), allowing him both to demonstrate how Conradi and Losy had absorbed influences coming from France and Italy but also to evoke the interior rhetoric of the music of these composers in Moreno’s inimitable exuberant style.