Bernardo Ottani (1736-1827)
- Sinfonia 'L'amore senza malizia' (1767)
Performers: Orchestre des Pays de Sаvoie; Reinhard Goеbеl (conductor)
Further info: Musiques a la Cour de Savoie
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Italian composer. A student of Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna, he
made his debut as a composer with an oratorio in 1765, the same year he
was elected to the Accademia Filarmonica. The following year he began to
receive commissions from Turin, Venice, and Genoa, later touring
Germany as a composer of opera. In 1769 he was appointed as maestro di
cappella at the church of San Giovanni in Monte in Bologna, later
becoming a keyboardist at the Teatro Publico. For Good Friday of 1770 he
wrote another oratorio, and later that year he was one of ten musicians
chosen by the Accademia to compose and conduct works for its annual
day-long concert, which took place on 30 August with Charles Burney and
the Mozarts in attendance. Burney thought him ‘young and promising’, and
described the Laudate pueri as containing ‘many ingenious, pretty
things’. Shortly after this, on 9 October, Ottani was one of Wolfgang’s
examiners for his election to the academy. In 1774 Ottani served as the
academy’s president. In 1779 the successful performance of an opera at
the Teatro Regio in Turin led to him being appointed as maestro di
cappella there, a position he retained his entire life. During the
French occupation he was involved in the dissolution of the Royal Chapel
in 1798, the closing of the Teatro Regio and the shutting down of
musical activity. Continuing his duties at the cathedral he wrote
several religious compositions for the coronation of Napoleon and was
nominated maestro di musica to the Prince and Princess Borghese. As the
only survivor of the old order at the time of the Restoration, he was
entrusted with the task of reorganizing a new Royal Chapel in 1814. As a
composer, his music, little studied, includes 46 Masses, 14 operas,
including 'L'amore senza malizia' (Venice, 1767), 'Le virtuose ridicole'
(Dresden, 1769), and 'L'amore industrioso' (Dresden, 1769), numerous
arias and other insertions, an oratorio, three cantatas, 10 sacred
works, and six keyboard sonatas. His brother, Gaetano Ottani
(c.1734-1808), was a wellknown tenor and landscape painter.
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