A keen continuo player and chamber musician, lutenist Axel Wolf’s previous recordings include music by JS Bach, Handel, Hasse and SL Weiss. Here he turns his attention to the music of a lutenist/composer of a former generation, Michelagnolo (or Michelangelo) Galilei (1575-1631), who, along with other early Baroque masters of the lute such as Alessandro Piccinini and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, helped bolster the instrument’s waning popularity.

A son of the music theorist Vincenzo Galilei and brother of the astronomer and polymath Galileo, Michelagnolo for most of his professional life served Duke Maximilian I in the Munich court orchestra. His gift to posterity is however a collection of dances for solo lute organised by key, Il primo libro d’intavolatura di liuto (1620), of which only two copies are now extant: one in Kraków, the other in the British Library. The ‘suites’ presented here comprise a toccata followed by a small number of Italian dances which might include a corrente, a saltarello, a passamezzo, a volta or a gagliarda or multiples thereof.

Wolf also enjoys jazz improvisation and he brings some of his improvisatory flair to the toccatas, which invariably begin with an arpeggiated flourish before unfolding in expressive waves rippling with trills and studded with crunchy dissonances. The dances, mostly in duple or triple time and often characterised by dotted rhythms, are equally flowing though less prone to variations in tempo. Here, Wolf exploits the sometimes mellow, sometimes pungent timbre of his instrument to full effect, leaving its more sonorous, darker qualities for the toccatas.