Concerti da Camera

The world premiere recording of Torelli's Triosonatas opus 2 (1686) performed by violinist Pietro Battistoni together with the Rosso Verona Baroque Ensemble. This recording is an important contribution to our appreciation of Torelli as a pivotal chamber music composer.

Georg Philipp Telemann's chamber oeuvre has always had a significant place in the repertoire of the Camerata Köln. The ensembles contributions to this field have included complete recordings of magnificent cyclical work groups such as his Essercizii musici, Trios of 1718, Six Concerts et Suites, Die kleine Kammermusik, and Der getreue Music-Meister. The present release rounds off the complete recording of Telemanns concertos with wind instruments on a total of 16 CDs on cpo. The Baroque orchestra La Stagione Frankfurt led by Michael Schneider performed the orchestral compositions, and the Camerata Köln was responsible for the chamber works and the wind soloists of the two ensembles are identical. The second release of the Concerti da Camera once again contains chamber masterpieces by Telemann featuring a complex texture of parts in a concerto style in which each of the concertizing instruments is allowed to come forward with thematic material as well as with figurations.

The world premiere recording of Torelli's Triosonatas opus 2 (1686) performed by violinist Pietro Battistoni together with the Rosso Verona Baroque Ensemble. This recording is an important contribution to our appreciation of Torelli as a pivotal chamber music composer.

Immensely popular during his time and maintaining their appeal today, Corelli's 12 Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, are among the gold standard for the form. They are divided into two sections, one being six concerti da camera and the other being six concerti da chiesa. The informatively written liner notes for this Harmonia Mundi album describe the potentially immense orchestra (for the time) that Corelli may have employed for his performances; this recording, however, uses more modest numbers, taking into account the different needs for the "da Camera" and "da Chiesa" concerti. French-based Ensemble 415 (which takes its name from a common Baroque tuning frequency) is led by its founder, violinist Chiara Banchini.

En ce nouveau volume, Opus 111 poursuit son entreprise de découverte de l'oeuvre vivaldien. Le choix de mêler concertos et cantates, opéré déjà dans le précédent volume, se révèle toujours aussi judicieux : c'est en somme une manière de donner à la philologie et au souci archéologique les séductions du concert.

The project to record all of the 450-odd works by Vivaldi held by the National University Library of Turin proceeds apace. It only seems yesterday that I was reviewing the opera "Orlando Furioso". For that set a very radical band of period performers was chosen, the Ensemble Matheus. L’Astrée – a Turin group in spite of its French name – are less radical in the sense that they don’t make their instruments rasp and bite, but I would say no less imaginative. With the help of a really lifelike recording – the instruments truly seemed to be in my listening room – the music just leaps off the page.

In this second volume of the complete recording of Vivaldi's chamber concertos by L'Astrée, three of these fascinating works are coupled with three chamber cantatas. All these treasures of course come from the incomparable collections of the Biblioteca nazionale in Turin, but the link between the two repertoires does not stop there. First of all, the energy and virtuosity that this composer of genius requires of his musicians are very much the same, whether he is writing for the human voice or for the various instruments used in the concertos, which go from a single solo flute in the concerto La notte RV 104 to the extravagant combination, in RV 97, of viola d'amore, two horns, two oboes and bassoon.