Vivaldi 12 Sonatas

This release ’Pellegrina’s Delight’ is a joy from start to finish and a testament to Vivaldi’s undoubted genius. It is good to have this wonderful disc of Vivaldi works imaginatively themed around the oboe and a most welcome change too from yet another version of the ubiquitous ‘Four Seasons‘!

Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.

Enrico Onofri est souvent invité à participer aux productions d'ensembles tels que La Capella Reial de Catalunya dirigée par Jordi Savall, le Concerto Italiano dirigé par Rinaldo Alessandrini ou encore le Concentus Musicus Wien dirigé par Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
Violon solo de l'ensemble Il Giardino Armonico depuis 1987, il participe à des enregistrements pour le label Teldec en interprétant le répertoire italien pour violon et orchestre…

A beautifully-packaged 50-disc box set, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, one of the most important and adventurous early music labels. The set contains 50 classic recordings of baroque and ancient music, chosen to represent the breadth of this huge and varied catalogue and each disc is slip-cased with artwork replicating the original CD or LP artwork.