1990 Zanin organ at the Basilica of Saint Rita, Turin, Italy

Deep in its heart, it is all about a search for poetic, and musical, truth. On our next Pipedreams program, we investigate the tradition of the Ricercare, one of the earliest forms of Baroque instrumental music. Our examples take us back to the mid 16th century and feature an instrument even one hundred years older, at a Basilica in Bologna. Simple themes develop and interweave in phrases both rhapsodic and rigorous. Beyond the fertile Italian homeland, we visit churches in Stockholm, San Francisco, and the Netherlands for performances by John Weaver, Massimo Nosetti, Liuwe Tamminga, and Jean Guillou of works by Bach and Frescobaldi, and Menotti. Ancient and eloquent, our ears follow it heavenward. Ricercare for the Sky the ancient art of counterpoint, this week on Pipedreams.

We trace back root causes on this week’s show, exploring composers in Italy, who laid the foundations for much of what we enjoy in classical music today. And organbuilders, too, whose instruments in Bologna, Treviso, Turin and Pistoia retained an unparalleled degree of simplicity of design and purity of sound across four centuries of European history. Their unique character blooms in the special idioms of Frescobaldi, Pasquini, Valeri and others, as we discover during A Sojourn in Italy.

With soloist Massimo Nosetti we explore a seldom heard yet charming and characterful repertoire from five centuries, played on period instruments.

…a sesquicentennial tribute to Marco Enrico Bossi [1861-1925] the composer, virtuoso, and teacher who ‘modernized’ the art of the organ in Italy with his passionate, romantic music.