Alessandrini

This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way devoted to making Vivaldi out as a rebel in his time.

This disc is a tour de force, a world premiere recording of stunning music splendidly performed. The unjustly obscure Antonio Maria Bononcini was appointed late in life to be maestro di cappella in Modena, a post which allowed him to pour his store of invention into two grand sacred works, a Mass and a Stabat Mater. Conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini engages deeply with the composer’s imagination, opening up his dense counterpoint and delicately binding together his vocal and obbligato lines. The musical rhetoric of the Concerto Italiano is spellbinding, particularly when band and singers heighten gestures to surge powerfully towards a passage’s final cadence. However heated their delivery becomes – and the Stabat Mater does sizzle – the artists never rush. This is particularly crucial for bringing out Bononcini’s modulations and textures, which, because they shift rapidly, need space to breathe.

Boris Begelman, the highly acclaimed leader of Concerto Italiano, frequently takes on the role of soloist in the many concerts that Rinaldo Alessandrini’s celebrated orchestra devotes to the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. High time then for Begelman to take centre stage in one of the Vivaldi Edition’s solo violin recordings. This ninth concerto volume sees the welcome return of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s ensemble, which already features in thirteen albums of the Vivaldi collection. In this purely instrumental repertoire they excel as much as they do in vocal music, deploying generously sweeping melodic lines, inspired dynamics, and a musical language already mastered to perfection yet always interpreted anew.

This isn't the 'Vivaldi Vespers', or even a reconstruction of a specific event, but a kind of 'sacred concert' in Vespers form, of the sort that Venetian churches in Vivaldi's time would mount in the name of worship.
Whether he ever supplied all the music for any such occasion isn't clear, but he certainly set plenty of Vespers texts, enough at any rate for Rinaldo Alessandrini and scholar Frédéric Delaméa to put together this rich programme.

The musical partnership of violinist Enrico Gatti and harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini now goes back a number of decades to when this pair of Italians, both with a voracious appetite for early music, were setting out on their careers. The years pass and both artists make fabulous recordings, often directing their own ensembles.

The arias, duets, recitatives and overtures in this recording are not grouped according to a set theme or singing style: heroic tenors, rival queens or famous castrati. Instead, if the sleeve-notes are to be believed, soprano Sandrine Piau, contralto Sara Mingardo and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini set out simply to enjoy themselves by performing favourite works from across Handel’s operatic output. Their only rules were to omit the very famous numbers - ‘Cara sposa’ from Rinaldo, for example, is not included - maintain a sense of mood contrast, and to include opening recitatives as a means of placing the characters within the dramatic context of each opera.

"L’Inimico delle Donne" which means someone who doesn’t like women, is an opera written by Galuppi in 1771. He was very well-known at this time but when he died, suddenly his works disappeared from the stages. Among them ”L’Inimico delle Donne” disappeared so well that nobody knew it existed. Hence it has never been played since its first venue in Venice in 1771. Some years ago its manuscript was found in Lisbon and Royal Opéra de Wallonie decided to recreate and to stage it.

The concertos for strings are a very special genre in Vivaldi's output. Contrary to the concertos for solo instruments, those offer a real balance and amazing range of colours between all the intruments concerned. Following a very successful first volume, released in 2004, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano offer a new milestone recording in Vivaldi's instrumental music, full of colours and refinement.

Italian Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio was internationally recognized as the leading composer of madrigals at the height of his career, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. He was so popular (and the sales of his music so lucrative) that within years of his death, both Flemish and German publishers had issued volumes of his complete five and six part madrigals, an honor almost unheard of at the time. Marenzio's madrigals, while anticipating the songlike lyricism of monody that would come to dominate vocal music of the early Baroque, made full use of the textural and expressive qualities of Renaissance polyphony.