Bonifazio Asioli (1769–1832) is perhaps best known for being appointed the first director of the Milan Conservatory by Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, but Asioli augmented his teaching role with composition, writing a series of instrumental and vocal pieces and educational works.

Prior to taking up his post in Milan the young composer worked in Piedmont and Veneto as a private music teacher to the aristocracy, and in their salons he met various foreigners on tours of Italy and was exposed to musical tastes from the rest of Europe.

His early musical output reveals a composer attentive and receptive to the sophisticated international musical production he encountered in cosmopolitan centres such as Venice. His work draws notably on C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindsamer Stil, which Asioli employed expertly to express the refined and shifting aesthetics of the Mediterranean.

The Cello Sonata dates from 1786, during that pre-Milan period when Asioli divided his time between Venice and Turin. The Piano Sonatas, op.8, were published in London by Robert Birchall in the final years of the 18th century at the behest of the tenor Chevalier La Cainea, who was well known for his performance of one of Asioli’s several successful vocal works, the opera Pigmalione (1796).

Recorded in October of 2020 in Vicenza, Italy

Bilingual booklet in English and Italian contains notes on the composer and the works by Italian musicologist Licia Sirch

Francesco Galligioni plays a late-17th-century Cremonese cello

Jolanda Violante plays a Paul McNulty fortepiano after Walter & Sohn c.1805