Fabio Biondi, Europa Galante

There is no complete surviving score for Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte, but there is enough existing material that modern scholars have been able to reconstruct it primarily by making new settings of the lost recitatives. The first production of the opera since Vivaldi's time was at Spoleto in 2006 in a version by Alessandro Ciccolini, which was released as a DVD. Conductor Fabio Biondi made a version introduced in Venice in 2007, which is recorded on this 2010 Virgin CD. Biondi's recording has the advantage of two international superstars in the leading roles, tenor Rolando Villazón and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Diana Damrau is nearly in their league. Villazón's earthy voice is usually associated with 19th century and verismo Italian repertoire, but he has an acute sensitivity to Baroque vocal style, and his robust, almost baritonal tenor is entirely appropriate for a larger-than-life character like Hercules.

Leave it to Fabio Biondi to take a relatively "new" work of Antonio Vivaldi never before recorded and build something exciting and thoroughly relevant around it. Virgin Classics' Improvisata: Sinfonie con titoli features Vivaldi's plucky Sinfonia Improvisata, RV 802, a fragmentary work that was discovered only in 1999; this appears to be its first recording. As it lasts only three-and-a-half minutes, one could fill it out with other Vivaldi sinfonias and therefore duplicate dozens of other recordings. Instead, Biondi has taken account of the turbulent and highly pictorial character of the short Vivaldi work and has located a selection of similar pieces that complement it well. Most extraordinary among them is the sinfonia La tempesta di mare by mega-obscure Italian Carlo Monza and a cheerful, vibrant symphony by Giuseppe Demachi, La campane di Roma – decorative, highly programmatic pieces from the eighteenth century that have never seen the light of day.

Vivaldi was an innovator; that's a fact not always acknowledged so readily as it might be. These CD are full of examples of instrumental writing which broke new ground in the Venice of the start of the eighteenth century. The way in which the violin and organ interact in the central movement of the D minor concerto, RV541 [CD.2. tr.11], for example, was new. The exuberance of the solo passages for cello in the B Flat Major RV 547 [CD.1. tr.11] sound almost Beethovenian. Similarly the extent to which the violin is "encouraged" to stray well outside accepted melodic and rhythmic practice in the E Minor, RV 281 [CD.2 trs.1-3] has to be seen as pioneering at least; ingenious for sure. But at the same time, the playing here is never gratuitously eccentric.

No Baroque work is more familiar than Vivaldi's set of four programmatic violin concertos known as the Four Seasons, yet firebrand Italian violinist Fabio Biondi and his Europa Galante will make you feel as though you're hearing them for the first time in this recording, originally released on the Opus 111 label. Biondi's tempi are fast indeed in the outer movements, and he pushes some of Vivaldi's illustrative episodes into a realm of crescendi and descrescendi that's mighty unusual. And he ornaments the music freely. But his expressive devices are never Romantic – they come off as full-blooded, passionate responses to the music, and they never seem to violate the spirit.

No Handel opera is as enigmatic as Silla. His fourth London opera, it was composed in 1713 to a libretto by Giacomo Rossi, also the librettist of the composer s first great London triumph Rinaldo (1711). And that is just about the extent of any certainty on the subject. It might have been premiered in 1713 in London in a private concert at the Queen s Theatre, but even this remains unconfirmed. This is one of Handel s few historical operas, being concerned with Plutarch s account of the latter part of the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who after taking Rome became a tyrannical despot who murders his opponents, before suddenly retiring to his country estate to enjoy his leisure.

Preceded by a solemn prologue in which Iride admonishes mortals that they should not offend the gods, the story of Cavalli’s Didone comes to life thanks to numerous solo passages of highly varied character and structure, designed both for simple basso continuo support and for a more complex instrumental accompaniment, for five real parts which enjoy some independent moments and which create a diversion from the action or blend in with it in a wholly logical way, intensifying it in a studied, evocative manner.

Abandoned at the age of two months and taken in by the Ospedale della Pietà, Chiara (or Chiaretta) rose – within that enclosed charitable institution in Venice – to become one of the leading European violinists of the middle of the 18th century. No stranger to such acclaim himself from two and a half centuries later, Fabio Biondi, on his first release for Glossa, has devised a programme drawing on the personal diary of this remarkable musician – taught by Antonio Vivaldi, and later a virtuoso soloist on the violin as well as the viola d’amore – of concertos and sinfonias by composers who, like the prete rosso, taught at the Pietà: Porta, Porpora, Martinelli, Latilla, Perotti and Bernasconi are all musicians whose compositions charm and delight as much today as they will have done in the time of Chiara.

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos, yet even this tiny sample of six, written during the composer’s visit to Prague between 1730 and 1731, demonstrates in every movement his genius of harmonic and dramatic surprise. Each concerto is startlingly original, from the opening movement of the E Minor RV 278 that pits daring solo passages against a hypnotic, pulsing orchestra, while the same concerto’s Largo even feels modern in its angularity. A more familiar Vivaldi can be heard in the C Major RV 186, with its Italianate innocence and winsome middle Largo. But whatever the composer’s mood, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante thrill to his ingenuity at every step.

This production of Anna Bolena faithfully meets the musical vision proposed by Fabio Biondi. The mise-en-scène, therefore, excludes any explicit reference to the plot’s historical time, and the events have been set at the beginning of the 1800s, when Donizetti’s opera was premièred.

Het ensemble Europe Galante, onder leiding van Fabio Biondi, is sinds zijn oprichting in 1989 uitgegroeid tot één van de belangrijkste muziekgroepen op het gebied van de zeventiende- en achttiende-eeuwse Italiaanse barokmuziek. Op het programma staan dan ook verschillende Italiaanse componisten uit die tijd. Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) en Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764) waren in hun tijd beroemd om hun virtuoos vioolspel. Hun muziek is tegelijk vurig en virtuoos, maar blijft steeds elegant en hoogst melodieus.