The annual Italian music award «Franco Abbiati» Record Prize 2019 has a new laureate: The Italian musician, conductor and Artistic Director of INTERKULTUR’s choir competition “Isola del Sole” in Grado (Italy), Giovanni Acciai, was awarded the prize together with his ensemble «Nova Ars Cantandi». The National Association of Music Critics thereby honored the group’s CD Responsoria by Leonardo Leo (1694-1744), which was published in 2018 by the Deutsche Grammophon.

Originally composed for the Easter celebrations for the exclusive use of the court of the Viceroy of Naples, where L.  Leo served as a Chapel Master, these Responsoria, discovered by Giovanni Acciai in the Library of the «San Pietro a Majella» Conservatory in Naples, bestow melodic beauty, refined harmony and rhetorical doctrine, and thus give proof of the creative work and compositional imagination of their author Leonardo Leo. Get an impression of this musical opus here: