Vinícius Perez| The Galant Lute

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the lute was little but a memory, a symbol of past ages in the Romantic imagination, summoning up an era of chivalry and courtly love, usually to be found in paintings in the hands of a lover beneath the window of his mistress while he improvises a serenade. But far from it! The lute shaped, undergoing evolutionary changes in size and form, through a span of some three hundred years of musical history, and has left a vast surviving repertory of notated music – up to the end of the eighteenth century. The Brazilian Vinícius Perez devotes himself to that wonderful instrument with its intimate sound and recorded on ‘The Galant Lute’ works from the eighteenth century. ‘Galant Music’ was a term frequently used throughout the eighteenth century and covers the works commissioned by noble men and women, with the purpose of education, amusement and entertainment. Using the quiet and secluded location of a Swiss monastery, Vinícius recorded galant works by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as well as lesser-known masters as Karl Kohaut and Christian Gottlieb Scheidler. Works that were partly composed for the Lute, partly arranged by Vinícius Perez himself.