Fabio Scoto

Even in a field overcrowded with noteworthy editions of the Bach Sonatas for violin and harpsichord, these 1995 recordings maintain permanent status on my shelves. Fabio Biondi's fiddling is thoroughly steeped in the grammar of period performance yet avoids the exaggerated agogics, metronomic facelessness, and wimpy tonal qualities we often put up with in the name of authenticity. Abetted by Rinaldo Alessandrini's imaginative partnering, Biondi's characterful, singing sonority puts a fresh spin on every phrase. His improvised embellishments, no matter how audacious they sound at first, always arise out of an organic response to the music's spirit.

Presented by the Festival della Valle d’Itria, this is the first modern-day staging of Leonardo Leo’s Neapolitan revision of Handel’s Rinaldo, a pastiche with a Mediterranean allure, which was composed in 1718 but considered lost until a few years ago. The story behind this rare opera is fascinating: the score of Handel’s masterpiece was brought illegally to Naples by the castrato singer Nicolò Grimaldi, who had performed Rinaldo in London. Once in Italy, the work was given a makeover by local composers, including Leo, who adapted it to the taste of the Neapolitan public, adding intermezzos and amusing characters.

"La Gloria, Roma e Valore" by Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier (1662 -1700) is a solemn cantata for the inauguration of the new Venetian ambassador in Rome. Whoever thought that this is only ephemeral baroque music, is wrong: Often the composers showed what they were able to do, because unlike for example in the Opera House, in the audience were musical experts and potential constituents. The protégé of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni has really created a small musical jewel, which was convincingly recorded by Fabio Missaggia and I Musicali Affetti.

George Frideric Handel’s Duetti da camera from La Risonanza represent a welcome extension of the ensemble’s award-winning series of Handel solo cantatas on Glossa, and come with the luxurious vocal pairing of Roberta Invernizzi and Marina De Liso.

In the autumn of last year Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza embarked on a journey taking a fresh look – musicologically as well as musically – at the chamber cantatas to Italian texts and with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy. Where the first release on Glossa focused on works associated with Cardinal Pamphili in Rome, this new recording contains pieces – including the dramatic cantata Armida abbandonata and Handel’s ‘own’ Hunt Cantata – originating in the establishment of the Marquis Ruspoli and written for sopranos such asMargherita Durastante and Vittoria Tarquini.

In the third instalment in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of the secular cantatas with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy, come a quartet of works associated with the Venice-born maecenas Pietro Ottoboni – including the substantial Ero e Leandro, the libretto for which is plausibly considered to have been written by the Cardinal Ottoboni himself. As well as the seldom-performed cantata for bass, Spande ancora a mio dispetto and Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio scored forsoprano solo, Bonizzoni also directs the Spanish-texted Nose emendará jamás.

Two new voices join Fabio Bonizzoni's project of recording the entirety of the cantatas with instrumental accompaniment which Handel composed when in Italy: sopranos Nuria Rial and Maria Grazia Schiavo enter the compan of Roberta Invernizzi, Emanuela Galli, Raffaella Milanesi and Salvo Vitale, the singers who we have been able to hear in the first three volumes of the collection. In this fourth instalment (out of a total of seven CDs planned for release up to the end of 2009), we rediscover the patronage of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, which lay behind the important cantata a due entitled Aminta e Fillide; this was a work which was to provide the composer with a veritable seam of musical material for use, as "borrowings", in his operas Agrippina and Rinaldo - one of the reasons perhaps why this cantata has been rarely performed and even less recorded.

The Accademia degli Arcadi - that thought-provoking and ideas-creating literary circle set up by a group of poets, composers, aristocrats and churchmen, which championed a return to classical (and pastoral) ideals and one of whose keenest members was the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, Handel’s patron in Rome - forms the aesthetic background for this sixth and penultimate release in the series of Italian cantatas by the Saxon composer which Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza are making for Glossa. In an engrossing essay written by Carlo Vitali (which additionally benefits from the counsels of Michael Talbot), the listener/reader is introduced to the social and political references contained within the pastoral texts of Olinto, pastore arcade, Duello amoroso and Alpestre monte, the three Handel cantatas which make up this CD.

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.

A disc of Handel opera arias from Roberta Invernizzi is remarkable in its own right because it breaks new ground for the Milanese soprano. True, she has taken part in complete operas on disc as on stage, and has recorded plenty of arias by other composers of the time such as Vivaldi, Leo, Porpora, Feo or Mancini (Arias for Domenico Gizzi and I Viaggi di Faustina being two recent albums). This new release from Glossa, however, sees Invernizzi reflecting Handel’s special brand of emotional investigation and making her selection from the many regal characters which pepper Handel’s operas – Cleopatra, Berenice, Arianna and Alcina, among them – and their ardent, affecting, distraught and stately feelings.