L'astrée, Laura Polverelli Vivaldi: Concerti e Cantate da Camera I

In this second volume of the complete recording of Vivaldi's chamber concertos by L'Astrée, three of these fascinating works are coupled with three chamber cantatas. All these treasures of course come from the incomparable collections of the Biblioteca nazionale in Turin, but the link between the two repertoires does not stop there. First of all, the energy and virtuosity that this composer of genius requires of his musicians are very much the same, whether he is writing for the human voice or for the various instruments used in the concertos, which go from a single solo flute in the concerto La notte RV 104 to the extravagant combination, in RV 97, of viola d'amore, two horns, two oboes and bassoon.

The project to record all of the 450-odd works by Vivaldi held by the National University Library of Turin proceeds apace. It only seems yesterday that I was reviewing the opera "Orlando Furioso". For that set a very radical band of period performers was chosen, the Ensemble Matheus. L’Astrée – a Turin group in spite of its French name – are less radical in the sense that they don’t make their instruments rasp and bite, but I would say no less imaginative. With the help of a really lifelike recording – the instruments truly seemed to be in my listening room – the music just leaps off the page.

En ce nouveau volume, Opus 111 poursuit son entreprise de découverte de l'oeuvre vivaldien. Le choix de mêler concertos et cantates, opéré déjà dans le précédent volume, se révèle toujours aussi judicieux : c'est en somme une manière de donner à la philologie et au souci archéologique les séductions du concert.

Scion of one of Italy’s most musical 17th-century families, Giovanni Bononcini became such a force in an era when the oratorio was king that he rivaled Handel in popularity across the continent. Venturing from Italy to England and back again, Bononcini was branded something of a political malcontent, though the music heard in this set has all of the political dogma of a John Clare poem: which is to say, none at all, a music of mead and meadow, an image that I assume the sylphs on the booklet’s cover are meant to conjure in their contented gazes.

There could hardly be any contrast more striking than that of "Messiah" with these delicate miniatures composed by Handel during his stay in Italy before he settled in London. They are vocal chamber music of the highest quality. They give no inkling that the graceful young composer might later produce anything like the "Hallelujah" chorus, though there is a clear pre-echo of "For unto us a child is born."

Vivaldi, the Venetian, master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately-recognisable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colours and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes.

This new recording in the Edition Vivaldi series – the first of two volumes dedicated to Vivaldi’s "cantate da camera" for soprano – displays the energetic vitality with which a new generation of artists in their thirties is encountering the baroque repertoire. This sixty-eighth album of the Edition highlights the expressively powerful voice of the soloist, soprano Arianna Vendittelli, already heard in the operas Il Tamerlano (2020) and Il Giustino (2018) conducted by Ottavio Dantone, as well as the artistic vision and high standards of the harpsichordist, organist and conductor Andrea Buccarella, who in 2018 carried off the first prize at the Bruges International Early Music Competition with his Abchordis Ensemble.

During his lifetime, from his Neapolitan years to his Spanish sojourn, Domenico Scarlatti cultivated the “cantata” genre, composing at least about sixty works – those of uncertain attribution and his Serenades excluded. Other cantatas are likely to emerge once the uncatalogued funds are systematically scanned. Since in those years the cantata was a genre on the wane, this high number is revealing of Scarlatti’s uninterrupted link with the baroque tradition, an age in which the cantata had reached its climax as an extremely refined genre, the place for daring experimentation, and exquisite writing, the appropriate gym for high craftsmanship, as expected by the elitist audience for which it was intended. The manuscripts date from 1699 to 1724.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Handel's Italian-language cantatas as recordings have begun to reflect the vast totality of his output rather than a selection of big hits ideologically bound up with British nationhood. The works on this disc date from early in Handel's career, while he was working in Italy; this Italian recording accurately uses the German spelling of the composer's name, Händel, which he would still have been employing at the time. They are youthful works in the best sense of the word: they break formal boundaries, give full voice to passions, and feel gloriously free to push performers to the edge.