Il 6

The HAYDN2032 edition celebrates the release of the tenth volume in the complete recording of Haydn’s 107 symphonies. Entitled ‘The Times of Day’, this programme is devoted to Symphonies nos. 6, 7 and 8, whose individual names translate as ‘Morning’, ‘Noon’ and ‘Evening’. Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, who commissioned the work, is said to have wanted to show his guests that his orchestra was of excellent quality and that ‘his’ Haydn was highly inventive. Giovanni Antonini’s orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico, once again rises to the challenge! This triptych following the sun’s course is prolonged into the night by the work of another composer: Mozart’s Serenade in D major, nicknamed Serenata notturna, probably written for a masked ball at Salzburg Town Hall in February 1776. Jérôme Sessini of the Magnum agency, who has won awards for his work on the cartel wars in Mexico and the opioid crisis in the United States, took the photographs featured in this volume.

Demofoonte dates from the early Milan years of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), long before the radical reform operas for which he is most famous and his break with opera seria and the librettos of Pietro Metastasio. Gluck arrived in the northern Italian city in 1737 and was mentored there by composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Though Sammartini primarily composed symphonies and music for the church, Milan boasted a vibrant opera scene, and Gluck soon formed an association with one of the city's up-and-coming opera houses, the Teatro Regio Ducal.

Italian master Baldassare Galuppi's catalog is so heavy with opera, sacred vocal works, and solo harpsichord pieces that it tends to dwarf his tiny output of purely instrumental music, a good deal of which awaits proper documentation. The odd-numbered set of seven Concerti a Quattro recorded here by Genoa-based newcomers Ensemble Il Falcone on the Italian Dynamic label originate not with a published set, but a set of manuscript parts in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. The first printed editions of these concerti came out in the early '60s, and a few have been recorded as separate items, with L'Offerta Musicale being the first to release a recording of the whole set for Tactus in 2000. According to Dynamic, neither of the two published editions was pressed into use here; the music is played from the original manuscript parts.

After a long period of neglect, Handel's 1719 opera Ottone has attracted renewed attention from historical-performance groups. The opera deals with episodes from the life of Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor in the 10th century, a topic so obscure that even for an 18th century audience an "argument" had to be attached to the libretto by way of background information. The opera was highly successful in Handel's own time, perhaps less for its musical value than for the always fun news stories about the stars in Handel's orbit; this time the feature was soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, who refused to sing the aria "Falsa imagine" until Handel threatened to throw her out a window.

Though he called them concertos, Vivaldi’s RV87-108 are basically chamber pieces, comprising obbligato parts for between three to six instruments (mostly winds) plus basso continuo. Of the 22 such concertos attributed to Vivaldi, three are now considered spurious: the remaining 19 have been collected onto CD by a new Italian period-instrument group, Il Giardino Armonico. The vigour, the zest of these performances is infectious. Il Giardino Armonico marry sharp ensembles to breezy tempos and at times a markedly exuberant sense of dynamics. Some may find the results abrasive, but I enjoyed the extra frisson of drama the group extracts from the music.