Il Giardino Dell Eden 1980

Giovanni Antonini and his ensemble Il Giardino Armonico celebrate the composer who made them famous: Antonio Vivaldi. Their recordings of The Four Seasons and Cecilia Bartoli's famous first Vivaldi recital left an indelible mark on the discography of the Red-haired Priest! Their musical fireworks display continues with a programme of concertos that is bound to provoke strong reactions, since it is the result of a meeting with a musician who is equally adept at shifting boundaries, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

The German soprano Anna Prohaska joins Alpha Classics for several recording projects. Her first recital brings together two superb African queens – Dido and Cleopatra – and follows them all over Europe during the first century of opera, from the 1640s to 1740. A firework display of arias, virtuosic and tragic by turns, written by the leading personalities of Baroque music (Cavalli, Handel, Purcell, Hasse) and composers still awaiting rediscovery suchas Sartorio, Graupner and the Venetian Castrovillari./quote]

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.

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.

The senses reign, and Reason now is dead (Petrarch). Giovanni Antonini, flautist and founder of the legendary Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, enjoys musical voyages, the discursiveness of music. He begins with an anonymous 16th century pavane, La Morte della Ragione (The Death of Reason), which he believes refers to In Praise of Folly, in which its author Erasmus distinguishes between two forms of madness: a sweet illusion of the spirit, and a negative form, one that the vengeful Furies conjure up from hell…

What if the tour de force of French opera in the Age of Enlightenment was Scylla et Glaucus? At the age of 50, the famous violinist Leclair decided to write his first operatic piece, investing irrepressible energy in it. The drama is unrelenting: the nymph Scylla spurns the advances of the Demigod Glaucus, who seeks out the sorceress Circe to cast a spell on her; Circe is in love with Glaucus, drives Scylla to madness and turns her into a deadly rock… An infernal scene, an ocean storm and final cataclysm are employed to give striking relief to this trio of unappeased love, the effusions of irresistible beauty. The conductor and violinist Stefan Plewniak conducts a glorious stage of soloists in the eddies of vengeance!

Multi award-winning period performance ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, led by the charismatic and inspiring Giovanni Antonini, make their first appearance on the newly invigorated l'oiseau lyre label with a wonderful new recording of Handel's 12 concerti grossi op. 6 to mark the composer's anniversary year (2009). Handel's concerti grossi, op. 6 are one of the pillars of baroque orchestral music. Il Giardino Armonico takes a characteristically dramatic and instinctively Italian view of the music (Handel did after all hone his compositional skills in Italy before settling in England). The group hopes to reclaim Handel for Italy by exploring some of the unique qualities that their native temperament can bring to the music.