Marco Baldini

200 copies. Light blue vinyl. Including an original insert that functions as Obi, with liner notes by Bradford Bailey and James Rushford.

Fortunale is a string quartet by Marco Baldini, composed between 2024 and 2025 and recorded by Quartetto Maurice with Manuel Volpe at Okum Studio in Rivoli, near Turin, in October 2025. It began as a duo for violin and viola and found its final form as a quartet.

The title is an archaic Italian word for an event brought about by chance, long used for a violent storm. A storm did break outside the studio during the recording, and its sound came through the walls. Across the two sides, in seven sections that pass into one another over about 38 minutes, close chords shift slowly in register and density, held notes move from one instrument to another, and long rests hang between them. At times the four strings fuse into something close to a single reed organ. Behind it lie Renaissance and early Baroque music, quotations from Bartók, the Japanese shō and Baldini's long study of Dhrupad.

Born in 1986 near Florence, Baldini plays trumpet in Blutwurst and has released Vesperi and Maniera on Another Timbre. Fortunale is his first record for Blume.

Side A: Fortunale (Part I). Side B: Fortunale (Part II). Quartetto Maurice: Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola), Aline Privitera (cello). Recorded by Manuel Volpe at Okum Studio, Rivoli, Turin, on 23 October 2025. Mixed by Francesco Toninelli. Mastering by Andrea Marutti.