Enrico Onofri

Fireworks, virtuosity and bravura pieces are essential ingredients of Vivaldi’s concerto oeuvre. Discover or rediscover Vivaldi’s concertos played by the most prestigious artists.

This box set gathers all the violin concertos availa-ble in the Vivaldi Edition, plus Concerto Italianos benchmark recording of the red priest's most emblematic work: The Fours Seasons. A real 6-hour baroque violin feast!

10 CDs performed by outstanding artists such as Sigiswald Kuijken, Andreas Staier, Michael Schneider, Skip Sempé, Thomas Hengelbrock, Freiburger Barockorchester, Collegium Aureum, Camerata Köln, La Petite Bande, Capriccio Stravagante and more.

A journey through seventeenth-century Rome, the rough and magnificent city where Caravaggio and Stradella lived. Strict counterpoint and learned polyphony in the lute and keyboard pieces by Kapsberger, Pasquini and Frescobaldi mingle with light dances and popular songs for guitar. Improvisation is the feature linking both sound-worlds: the high culture of church chapels and noble palaces, and the lore of streets and taverns. A careful study of the original sources guided our choices as to instruments and interpretation. According to historically informed practice, the celebrated Antidotum Tarantulæ and further early specimens of tarantella, as written down by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, are played on bagpipes, drums and guitars.

For this new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Jordi Savall conducts an all-female orchestra, as Vivaldi did in his time at the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, particularly in the field of folk music, playing violin, folk fiddle, kyl- kobiz, ghizzhak and similar instruments. She studied Baroque violin with Enrico Onofri (Palermo Conservatory) and Hiro Kurosaki (Mozarteum University), focusing on historically informed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires.