Gennari Rinaldo

Sara Mingardo has been creating quite a stir in baroque circles but this is my first chance to catch up with her. In one sense she may be considered a "typical" baroque singer, in the sense that she uses a completely straight vocal production, from which vibrato has been rigorously excluded, and cultivates a somewhat plangent, nasal sound, with the result that a casual listener might suppose he was listening to a counter-tenor.

The music for harpsichord has been considered an inexplicable chance occurrence in Alessandro Scarlatti's output, and in assessing it, we should avoid unfair and unappropriate comparisons with the work of his exceptionally gifted son. Alessandro's cultural background was quite different and very precise in the way it affected keyboard music: Frescobaldi was the first in a series of figures who are known to a greater or lesser extent today and whose teaching came down to Scarlatti in a solid stylistic tradition. Pasquini, his extremely diligent and prolific contemporary, the last of the line, was strongly motivated by his patron, the Prince Borghese in writing harpsichord music. Alessandro also wished to try his hand in this area. 250th Anniversary Release. On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of Alessandro Scarlatti's birth (Palermo, 2 May 1660), Arcana is re-releasing this anthology of toccatas and fugues by the elder Scarlatti, father of the better-known Domenico.

At the harpsichord, Rinaldo Alessandrini creates several ‘suites de danse’ from the magnificent output of Louis Couperin.

If you're familiar with Alessandrini and his sparkling period instrument ensemble you expect interpretations featuring rhythmic drive, colorful playing, and original insights. Those characteristics are what help make this version of Bach's perennial and oft-recorded Brandenburg Concertos so compelling. Tempos are generally on the fast side, but never overly swift, while slow movements have just the right touch of soulfulness. Virtually without exception, the solo bits are done with imaginative, fluent expertise, and Gabriele Cassone's rendition of the famous trumpet part of the Second Brandenburg provides musical thrills, as well as virtuoso ones. Alessandrini himself takes us on a wild ride through the Fifth Concerto's brilliant harpsichord cadenza.

Two musical titans in the classical world, award-winning Italian bass Lorenzo Regazzo and Italian conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini, are brought together once again to record the greatest operatic arias by George Frederic Handel. Handel, one of the most celebrated operatic composers of the eighteenth century, always remained out of step with the preferences of his era - notably his attachment to the 'natural' male voice in a time when the high voices of women or castratos triumphed everywhere.

A challenge to the virtuoso. While they belong to the German tradition, in these sonatas Bach invented a curious division of the parts in which the viola da gamba lies midway between the bass and the principle voice (the treble) of the harpsichord. This particularity in the writing and their exceptional ingenuity place these works among the great masterpieces in the viola da gamba repertoire, both fascinating and terrifying to performers…

Three serenatas by Vivaldi survive (he is known to have composed at least eight)‚ of which La Senna festeggiante is by far the most enjoyable…One of the work’s most interesting features is Vivaldi’s deliberate use in places of elements of French style‚ for instance in the solemn ‘ouvertur’ which opens Part 2 and the courtly minuet of The Golden Age’s second aria‚ thereby adding to the richness of a work which for the most part is vintage Vivaldi at his most buoyant and irresistible.

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.

Italian Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio was internationally recognized as the leading composer of madrigals at the height of his career, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. He was so popular (and the sales of his music so lucrative) that within years of his death, both Flemish and German publishers had issued volumes of his complete five and six part madrigals, an honor almost unheard of at the time. Marenzio's madrigals, while anticipating the songlike lyricism of monody that would come to dominate vocal music of the early Baroque, made full use of the textural and expressive qualities of Renaissance polyphony.

Claudio Monteverdi's Seventh Book of Madrigals have been recorded well by several early music groups, but one expects superior readings from harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his vocal-instrumental ensemble Concerto Italiano, and indeed, one gets them here. Alessandrini's versions are on the spare side, with seven voices and an instrumental ensemble of 13 that includes three continuo instruments plus percussion, with Alessandrini's harpsichord prominent in the mix, but he has all the equipment he needs to deliver a really distinctive "concerto," as the title of the Seventh Book boldly proclaims itself. With this book, Monteverdi moved decisively away from the old polyphonic madrigal ideal and toward the text-based settings that would be the norm for vocal music over the next four centuries and counting.