Albinoni: 12 Concertos Op. 10 Claudio Scimone

This is a fine recording of the complete set of concertos for strings with solo violin and harpsichord by Tomaso Albinoni, performed by I Solisti Veneti directed by Claudio Scimone. Albinoni was a contemporary of the better-known Antonio Vivaldi and wrote concertos in a similar style. String instruments much as we know them today were developed in Cremona in the 17th and 18th centuries by three families in particular - Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari - to replace the viols that had been used in the previous centuries. As a result there were several composers, in Italy especially but also elsewhere in Europe, who composed works for these exciting new-sounding instruments.

During the 1990s, Collegium Musicum 90 and Simon Standage released several volumes of Albinoni concertos, which proved popular with critics and public alike. The concertos were released as discs of single oboe concertos, double oboe concertos, and string concertos. In this re-issue on the Chaconne label, the concertos are presented in opus number order, showing the contrasting colours and tonalities of the concertos as they originally appeared.

Jean Claude Malgoire began his musical studies in his native Avignon. At the Paris Conservatoire he took first prizes in oboe and in chamber music, embarking on a brilliant career as an instrumentalist at the age of twenty, crowned by the first prize in 1968 in the Geneva International Competition. His interest in contemporary music brought a recording of music by Holliger, Castiglioni and Shinohara and in 1972 Bruno Maderna chose him as a principal in the Ensemble Européen de Musique contemporaine. He was subsquently appointed by Charles Munch as cor anglais soloist in the Orchestre de Paris.

One of the darkest corners of Tomaso Albinoni's worklist is his chamber music. Albinoni's Opus 2, published in 1700, is particularly problematical, as half of its 12 numbers are chamber sonatas and the other half consists of concertos, chamber concertos to be sure, but the very word concerto is often taken automatically to mean orchestral music. T

Michala Petri war und ist das weibliche Gesicht der Blockflötenrenaissance. Die sympathische Dänin brillierte nicht nur virtuos im barocken Hit-Repertoire, wie ihre furiose Version von Vivaldis "Vier Jahreszeiten" eindrucksvoll belegt. Ihr unverwechselbarer, warmer Klang machte auch weniger bekannte Bach- und Händel-Sonaten mit Jazz-Legende Keith Jarrett zu einem Hörereignis. Auf diesen insgesamt 17 CDs, die zwischen 1987 und 2001 entstanden sind und die hier erstmals komplett erscheinen, zeigt sich das Können der ECHO Klassik-Preisträgerin bei einem immensen Repertoire von Bach und Telemann bis zu Raritäten von Grieg, zeitgenössischen, melodiösen Kompositionen, einem faszinierenden Weihnachtsalbum und herrlich-nostalgischen Piecen von Fritz Kreisler.