The only available complete recording of a hugely influential set of Baroque trio sonatas by a northern-Italian pioneer of the genre. Unrivalled in it's breadth, renowned for reviving countless names of the past in authoritative new recordings, the Baroque-music catalogue of Brilliant Classics welcomes a significant new name to it's long list of forgotten composers Giovanni Battista Fontana (1589-1630). Born in Brescia, dying in nearby Padova, Fontana is known for a single major publication, a collection of 18 Sonate a 1, 2, 3 per il violino o cornetto, fagotto, chitarone, violoncino o simile altro instromento, published posthumously in Venice in 1641. The Italian early-music Lux Terrae ensemble presents a new recording of the complete set, demonstrating it's foundational significance within the rich history of the Italian trio sonata as a genre. As in the chiaroscuro technique in painting, that defines images through the play of of light and shade, Fontana uses a musical chiaroscuro that lends theatricality and dynamism to these sonatas through a dialectic of contrasts and resolutions between contrasting idioms. All 18 sonatas follow a single-movement form, divded into contrasting sections. Their melodic material breathes the cantabile air of the 17th-century canzona or the dance and sometimes recurs, invariably elaborated, to form a simple arch design. Sonatas Nos. 2 and 6, on the other hand, comprise sections that grow out of recitative-like monody interspersed with freer instrumental flourishes, but subdivisions in dance-like triple metre are rarely absent for long. Lux Terrae is led from the violin by the Italian-trained Bolivian violinist Neyza Copa, who also introduces these Baroque rarities in a booklet essay. For her, Fontana's sonatas shine as 'a real jewel of the early Baroque, both in terms of the stylistic evolution of instrumental composition, and the d