Review Text
Girolamo Barbieri was born in Piacenza on 2nd October 1808. He began his musical career at a very young age and quickly became a skilled pianist and organist. In 1827 Giuseppe Nicolini, a talented organist and harpsichordist who worked in the ducal theatres of Piacenza, recommended sending him to study at the Conservatory in Milan. The Marquis Bernardino Mandelli, for whom Barbieri's father worked as a butler, offered to pay all the expenses but, in that same year, both Girolamo's patron and father died. Because of this, Barbieri began teaching himself music by using all the works he could borrow, and rapidly mastered the art of composition and instrumentation, thus becoming a sought-after conductor and skilled composer. Blessed with fluent melodic ease, he wrote countless compositions for solos, choirs, organ, piano and other instruments; his musical genre impeccably reflected the dramatic-operatic taste of the time. The pieces included in this release are among the most representative of his extensive organ production and find fertile ground in the typical "band/orchestral" sonority of the 19th-century Lombard tradition. On 24th July 1843, as recorded in archival evidence, he was called to inaugurate the newly built Angelo Amati great pipe organ in Pizzighettone (Cremona), which is the same organ which was used in this recording.
