Vivaldi 12 Sonatas

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.

It would be no exaggeration to name Antonio Vivaldi as the “pioneer of the bassoon concerto”. The first milestone in the emancipation of the bassoon, until the beginning of the 17 century exclusively used as a basso continuo instrument, for which the part wasn’t even written out, was a series of nine virtuoso bassoon sonatas published by Giovanni Antonio Bertoli in 1645.

Linn's Vivaldi: L'Amore per Elvira, featuring the English group La Serenissima under the direction of Adrian Chandler, has quite a bit to offer the Vivaldi fancier. First are Chandler's excellent reconstructions of two of the fragmentary "Graz" violin sonatas that have not come down with their continuo parts intact. Chandler has filled in the missing music with entirely satisfactory replacements that appear to be seamlessly Vivaldian, rendering these works into a listenable form for the first time.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi is arguably one of the best-known baroque composers. However, the rediscovery of the Prete Rosso in modern times took place quite recently. The history of this rediscovery might still offer us some surprises. This recording is aiming to be part of this history, featuring the most recently discovered Vivaldi sonatas for violin and continuo, including the latest discovered works by the Venetian composer (added to the RISM as RV 820 and RV 205/2), as identified by Javier Lupiáñez in 2015, and presenting the first recording of the RV 205/2.

As the rather extensive booklet notes by countertenor Flavio Ferri-Benedetti state, the Italian secular cantata was a byproduct of the so-called focus of the early 18th-century intellectual circles on good poetry based generally on classical themes. The result was a veritable torrent of smaller chamber works meant to highlight this literary genre, which had the effect of establishing it as one of the preferred vocal formats of the period. The settings were generally for voice and continuo, but here one finds a selection of works that include a full four-part accompaniment of strings. This allows for a fuller texture, making them more akin to brief opera scenes.

More than two centuries before John Lennon favorably compared the Beatles' popularity to that of Jesus, Italian violin virtuoso Francesco Maria Veracini confidently remarked that there was only one God, and only one Veracini. He was one of the first stars of the violin, younger than Corelli, roughly contemporary with Vivaldi and Tartini, who is better known only because of the satanic verses he wrote for the instrument.

Specchio veneziano or the Venetian mirror – this programme compares and contrasts two composers from the city of the Doges: on the one hand the celebrated Vivaldi, on the other a virtual unknown, Giovanni Battista Reali, who was born there in 1681, three years after Vivaldi, and died in 1751, ten years after his illustrious colleague. A violinist himself, he composed trio sonatas, including a very spectacular Folia, which Théotime Langlois de Swarte, Sophie de Bardonnèche, Hanna Salzenstein and Justin Taylor juxtapose with Vivaldi’s Folia, alongside other highly virtuosic pieces, many of them complete rediscoveries, since half of this program has never been recorded before.

Thibault Noally and Les Accents present a celebration of the Venetian Sonata. The term sonata was first coined at the end of the 16th century by Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli but it was Tartini, born and active in the Venetian Republic, who created some 200 sonatas for violin, the largest body of work in the form, followed by Vivaldi with 80. If Vivaldi borrowed from all an sundry [Caldara, Corelli, Matteis, Bonporti, Albinoni] then others were quick to borrow from him too and the Venetian sonata spread through competing musicians to Germany, via Pisendel and the Dresden court; France with Leclair and Guignone; and Russia with the Venetians Madonis and Dall'Oglio. Thibault Noally is a recognised name on the international baroque stage. He best-known as the solo violin of Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble with Marc Minkowski, with the Concerto Köln, Pulcinella or the Ensemble Matheus.