48° North. Caldara, from Venice to Vienna

48° North: Caldara, from Venice to Vienna is the debut album of The BanXhies, a young French period-instrument ensemble named for the Celtic banshee — a messenger between worlds — whose programme traces Antonio Caldara’s own journey from his native Venice to Vienna, where he settled in 1715 as vice-Kapellmeister alongside Johann Joseph Fux. Built around several of Caldara’s trio sonatas from his Op.1 set, the programme situates him among his formative Venetian influences (Legrenzi, Marini) and the Viennese-Germanic circle he entered (Fux, Muffat, Biber, Froberger), with detours through Vivaldi, Porpora, and a Bach transcription of Marcello. The result is a portrait of Caldara as a composer at the crossroads of Italian clarity and Germanic contrapuntal depth — a style that would later leave its mark on Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn.

The BanXhies are resident artists at the Fondation Singer-Polignac and alumni of the 2024 S-EEEmerging programme, and they perform on a striking array of loaned period instruments, including a 1662 Nicolò Amati violin, a 1740 François Vaillant violin, an Italian harpsichord by Philippe Humeau, and a German harpsichord modelled on a 1738 Christian Vater original. The album grew out of the ensemble’s own founding encounter with Caldara’s Sonata Op.5 No.1 in 2022, and was supported in part by a crowdfunding campaign.

The BanXhies