Gennari Rinaldo

Concerto Italiano, founded and directed by Renaissance and Baroque specialist Rinaldo Alessandrini, is an outstanding vocal and instrumental ensemble. Each of its singers has an exceptionally lovely voice: strong, pure, focused, and full of character. Together, they produce a fabulously rich blend that is warm and sensual without sacrificing purity. The individuality of the members and their ability to meld into a seamless unity are characteristics ideal for late Renaissance madrigals, especially the idiosyncratic madrigals of Gesualdo, where the distinctiveness of each voice is essential for music that is essentially driven by its counterpoint, and the unanimity of the blend allows the eccentricities of harmony to make their maximum impact.

A glorious collection of Monteverdi's church music performed expertly by the Concerto Italiano under Rinaldo Alessandrini. Starting of with a number of larger scale psalm settings concluded by a magnificat the focus subsequently moves to smaller scale settings written for avariety of occasions. The diction is very good and the music making always sensitive to the moods and the meaning of the words.

The style of Italian early music conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano might be described as both strongly expressive and highly intelligent. Consider this recording of Monteverdi's Sixth Book of Madrigals, pieces that hover between the older polyphonic madrigal tradition and the newer, essentially soloistic and dramatic language of opera. The texts of these mostly five-part pieces focus almost exclusively on extremely melancholy depictions of mourning for love lost, mostly through death – something Alessandrini in his detailed and highly informative notes attributes to the death of Monteverdi's wife and his favorite female student shortly before the music was composed. Alessandrini takes the ideal of text expression as paramount, downplaying larger formal details in favor of a sequence of extremely intense moments.

This isn't the 'Vivaldi Vespers', or even a reconstruction of a specific event, but a kind of 'sacred concert' in Vespers form, of the sort that Venetian churches in Vivaldi's time would mount in the name of worship.
Whether he ever supplied all the music for any such occasion isn't clear, but he certainly set plenty of Vespers texts, enough at any rate for Rinaldo Alessandrini and scholar Frédéric Delaméa to put together this rich programme.

Monteverdi was only 23 when he published his Second Book of Madrigals in 1590, but he was already a master of the form, and these contrapuntally lively pieces, with their supple and astute text setting, are crowning works of late Renaissance secular polyphony. With this release of the Second Book, Rinaldo Alessandrini moves closer to his goal of recording all of Monteverdi's eight Books of Madrigals, performed by Concerto Italiano, the ensemble he founded in 1984. The series has received much-deserved critical acclaim; three of the releases won Gramophone Awards, and this 1994 recording won a Diapason d'Or. Concerto Italiano is a group whose roster is flexible, based on the requirements of the music performed, and here seven unaccompanied singers configure themselves in a variety of combinations in the five-part madrigals.

Rinaldo Alessandrini's brilliantly realized recording of Monteverdi's Vespers is an intimate, slightly pared down version of the early Baroque masterpiece. Working in the warm acoustic of Rome's Palazzo Farnese, he employs just one singer per part, and eliminates instrumental doublings in the choral movements except where they are expressly indicated. The result is a compact, richly haloed sound that won't ever knock you out of your chair, but which flatters the more intimate solo and duet movements that can sound anemic in grander productions; with the sound gap between the biggest and smallest movements closed, each holds its own within the overall structure of the piece. While Alessandrini deserves credit for his conception and leadership, and especially his insightful treatment of Monteverdi's ever-changing rhythmic flow, it is his group of 12 singers that make the strongest impression.

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.

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.

This talented Italian vocal ensemble, under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini, has already proved its excellence in previous discs of Monteverdi madrigals. In this engaging new release the artists turn their attention to ‘madrigal comedies’ by 16th-century Alessandro Striggio and his younger contemporary, Adriano Banchieri. These are highly entertaining, often witty pieces, with a strong onomatopoeic element and a profusion of vividly depictive images running through them.

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.