Enrico Onofri

Jordi Savall & Le Concert des Nations - Le Concert Spirituel: Au temps de Louis XV (2010) {Alia Vox AVSA 9877}
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© 2010 Alia Vox | AVSA 9877
Classical / Chamber Music / Baroque

Le Concert Spirituel was essentially a Parisian concert series held at the Tuileries Palace, begun in 1725 as an opportunity for musical performances during Lent and other Holy Days when secular musical activities like opera were forbidden. The concerts continued until 1790, just after the beginning of the French Revolution. The music of French composers filled most of the programs, but German and Italian music was occasionally heard, and this CD includes five pieces by Corelli, Telemann, and Rameau that were known to have been played at the concerts. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations, one of the many stellar ensembles he is responsible for founding, play these works with such surging vibrancy that anyone who thinks of the Baroque as a period of stiff formality would be disabused of that notion on hearing these performances.

Carlo Ambrogio Lonati (c.1645–c.1712) - Complete Sinfonias - Ensemble Giardino di Delizie (2019) {2CD Brilliant Classics 95590}
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© 2019 Brilliant Classics | 95590
Classical / Baroque

Another long-forgotten name takes his place in the huge library of Baroque composers published by Brilliant Classics thanks to spirited advocacy from a lively young Roman early-music group. The Milanese composer, impresario and singer Carlo Ambrogio Lonati (c.1645 – c.1712) made his name farther south, in Naples, as a singer and instrumentalist at the Royal Chapel. Some impression of his appearance may be inferred from the nickname widely bestowed upon him as ‘Il gobbo della regina’ (‘the queen’s hunchback’) during his period of service in the city to the expatriate Queen Christina of Sweden. Working in Rome and Genoa in close partnership with his fellow composer Alessandro Stradella, Lonati left Genoa in a hurry after the unexplained fatal stabbing of his friend in February 1682.

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.

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 Pietà in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, parti- cularly 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 in- formed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires. Such a profile made her the ideal candidate for a collaboration with Jordi Savall. She plays a Francesco Ruggeri violin, built in 1680 in Cremona, Italy. This double album sold at the price of a single new release of- fers the recording of the Four Seasons with and without the son- nets written by Vivaldi and four others concerti by Vivaldi. The version with read text sheds a particularly revealing light on Vivaldi’s work.