Diego Cantalupi

Born in Rome in 1600 in a family of musical traditions, Giovanni Felice Sances owes his musical education first to the Roman environment, and then to the Venetian, strongly influenced by the genius of Monteverdi that in those days was dominating unchallenged. The turning point of Sances life however, occurred at thirty-six when he was hired at the Imperial Chapel of Vienna, first as singer, and then - known for his skills - as main composer and favorite of the emperor; he retained this position until his death, leaving the Imperial Chapel an impressive number of compositions.

In the summer of 2011 France’s most eminent cultural institution, the Château de Versailles, joined naïve in celebrating Antonio Vivaldi with a month of concerts, fireworks and publications – the crowning glory of our first ten years of work in restituting the massive corpus of works by this little-known italian composer to the public. The Vivaldi edition, a recording venture conceived by the italian musicologist Alberto Basso (istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte) and the independent label naïve, is one of the most ambitious recording projects of the twenty-first century. its principal objective is to record the massive collection of Vivaldi autograph manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca nazionale Universitaria in Turin.

Thirty-seven completed and two unfinished bassoon concertos, more than for any other instrument except the violin; Vivaldi must have had one terrific fagottista in that ospedale . Well, Sergio Azzolino is pretty good, too.
Michael Talbot’s sensible notes observe that the bassoon concertos seem to come from the latter part of Vivaldi’s career, though, as with much of Vivaldi’s work, exact dating is seldom possible. He attributes this to a void in Italy between the fading of the dulcian from the standard instrumental ensemble and the slow introduction there of the Franco-German bassoon.