Guts Baroque featuring Andrus Madsen performs whimsical, varied, and fantastical instrumental music from the 17th-century courts of what is now Germany and Austria. Emperor Leopold I, himself a musician and composer, brought several prominent Italian musicians across the Alps to Vienna. These guests, including violin virtuoso Antonio Bertali, received good salaries and plenty of opportunities to perform, to compose, and to teach the new generation of German musicians the stylus fantasticus: the Italian style of purely instrumental fantasies made popular by Italian composers such as Girolamo Frescobaldi. Bertali’s student Johann Heinrich Schmelzer further developed the style, and his innovations helped spread it throughout what is now Germany, teaching and inspiring other prominent composers including Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber.

Guts Baroque

Sylvia Schwartz, violin

Rebecca Shaw, viola da gamba

Andrus Madsen, harpsichord