dionysos41 blog by Dino Villatico, 6th Feb. 2017 (engl. transl. of excerpts. Read the whole review in Italian here)

[…] Giovanni De Cecco […] has created here an ideal recording of what one should mean today by interpretation of Baroque music.
This CD has gathered some concertos by Vivaldi and one by Alessandro Marcello, that Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed for harpsichord, or perhaps simply for keyboard (when the target instrument is the organ, Bach explicitly declares it and composes accordingly).
[…] In a way the Bach transcription sometimes surpasses the original. But the execution on the clavichord succeeds in the effort to keep in the transcription for keyboard the timbre nuances and dynamics of the concerto for strings, moreover sometimes managing to emphasize the contrapunctual devices, and even to add new ones. For example in the final gigue of Concerto in G minor by Vivaldi (RV 316a) or when wonderful successions of chords are proposed (among Vivaldi’s most amazing creations) of which the dynamic sensitivity of the clavichord can return the timber richness, for example in the Largo of the same Concerto, in which the repeated chords alternate with openly cantabile passages.
A “Venetian” Bach, then, that makes us grasp the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Baroque Europe, where the styles and musical ideas circulated with great freedom.
Couperin in France turns to Corelli, Bach in Germany to the French concerto in his Brandenburg concertos, and to the Italian concerto in most of his work, Corelli himself in Rome (in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi, where he started his violin practice), in contact with French music, developed his new synthesis of the concerto, of which Handel was one of the great heirs.
But what is there to wonder if the same wonder of the great Renaissance Venetian painting, its new vision of color and light, is born because a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, back from Flanders, brings to Venice the new Flemish invention of oil painting? And would we have Petrarch’s great poetry without his long sojourn in France during his youth and then, after Petrarch, in the rest of Europe the explosion of subjective poetry until Shakespeare, Donne, Ronsard, Gòngora, Baudelaire? Europe was more united when States made war against each other. Culture circulated from country to country, each in turn an example and model of culture to the others.
Giovanni De Cecco makes us also think of this. But immerse yourselves in these Venetian concertos rethought by a German musician and interpreted, almost brought back to their homeland, by a Venetian musician. There is no page that does not tear a gasp of admiration, a backlash of emotion, for the freedom of phrasing, the sensitivity of touch, the imagination of timber solutions, that on the clavichord seem limitless. Bravo! As in every part of the world today, with an Italian word, we applaud the artist who does not betray the etymology of his profession: making art.
That is combining the accuracy and efficiency of the technique to the creative freedom of imagination. In modern Greek literature is called logotechnía, technique, art of the word, of speech. Whereas music comes from musiké, belonging to the Muses. Of course! After all also Latin ARS is both technique and art, meaning that the two are inseparable.
And this happens when we listen to Giovanni De Cecco playing Vivaldi and Marcello transcribed for keyboard by Bach. And at once the past becomes present. Because the beauty of this music – even if they are transcriptions, or perhaps better because they are transcriptions – makes us put aside all the restrictions of gender, imaginary philology, fashions, that confusedly clutter the contemporary interpretive view.
This Bach who transcribes Vivaldi appears extraordinarily contemporary, wonderfully similar to us, as free as many of us do not dare to be any more, because it suggests how misleading, sterile, superficial, and specious are many discussions about the correct interpretation of the music of the past.
If Bach transcribes Vivaldi, and De Cecco plays the transcriptions on the clavichord, why should I be forbidden to play Bach on the piano? Let us set the record straight.
I do not want to criticize the philology of the texts, which is sacrosanct, and the effort to understand with what instruments they once made music. Indeed they teach us to play it with more attention and understanding even on different instruments.
What I have always found annoying, is the fetish whereby the means justify the result. No, the use of original instruments in no way guarantees a correct interpretation of the music written for these instruments, if it is not accompanied by the freedom, imagination and invention that the musicians of the time adopted for their own interpretations. This is what De Cecco teaches us here: that that freedom, that fantasy, that invention are possible, and must always be exercised, whatever instrument you play, and more so if one is playing the instrument for which the composer once wrote and of which he thought about while writing. Bravo, Giovanni! Here’s to the next!

“Musica” magazine, February 2017 (engl. transl. of excerpts. Read the whole review in Italian here)
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“[…]The courageous recording initiative is linked to the name of Giovanni De Cecco, who plays a modern copy of a 1775 instrument, attributed to Johann Heinrich Silbermann. […]
[…] the interpreter’s expertise […] allows us to get accustomed to listening to an instrument too often unjustly neglected, but already present in the Baroque world. ”
Lorenzo Tozzi

“Il Friuli” magazine, February 2017 (engl. transl. of excerpts. Read the whole review in Italian here)
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“In the case of this recording Giovanni De Cecco uses all the possible gamut of colors, touches and dynamics; played by Giovanni De Cecco, the clavichord seems an instrument on which nothing is impossible.[…]
Extraordinary is the accuracy in the virtuosic moments (concerto BWV 972 from Estro Armonico by Vivaldi), in passages that are much easier to achieve on a harpsichord or a piano; gentle themes in pianissimo pizzicato (the second movement of concerto BWV 974); impetuous crescendos (III movement of concerto BWV 976).
De Cecco shows incredible imagination fantasy also in varying and embellishing themes, as in the third movement of concerto BWV 974, from the famous oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello: the reprises are ornamented with ideas that are brought to the climax. De Cecco in fact does not just offer here and there embellishments with good taste and inventiveness; he starts with an idea and does not abandon it until it is consistently expressed, even in the most difficult passages for the performer.
Surprising is also the bold use of variations in intonation; in concerto BWV 975, some high notes, played in vibrato, bebung, are almost shrill, like (apologies to purists) in the bending of electric guitars. They range from the sighs in pianissimo to harsh sounds, through moments of poignant lyricism, as in all the adagios of the recording. In fact a recording that must not be left out in the collections of baroque music enthusiasts.”