Vivaldi RV 503

A generously-filled programme featuring 17 of Vivaldi's 39 Bassoon Concertos in which the distinguished bassoonist Klaus Thunemann is partnered with one of the great baroque music ensembles, I Musici.Vivaldi's 39 bassoon concertos (two are incomplete) are at the cornerstone of the bassoon repertory and in the context of Vivaldi's output constitute the greatest number of concertos for a single solo instrument after his 200+ solo violin concertos.

A generously-filled programme featuring 17 of Vivaldi's 39 Bassoon Concertos in which the distinguished bassoonist Klaus Thunemann is partnered with one of the great baroque music ensembles, I Musici.Vivaldi's 39 bassoon concertos (two are incomplete) are at the cornerstone of the bassoon repertory and in the context of Vivaldi's output constitute the greatest number of concertos for a single solo instrument after his 200+ solo violin concertos.

Klaus Thunemann has been the world's premiere solo bassoonist for the past three decades. His technical mastery of the instrument–he has the facilty of a violinist–is impressive in and of itself, but he brings so much more to these hard-to-find recordings of Vivaldi's elegant concerti.

This was the great collection of 12 varied and exciting violin concertos that turned Bach on to concerto writing. In fact, he transcribed several of these works for solo harpsichord, organ–even for harpsichords and orchestra. What fascinated him most was the balanced, three-movement form, the brilliance of the solo passages, the tunefulness of the music generally, and Vivaldi's seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of invention. When a composer ventured to publish a collection such as this, he was making a major statement. This is one of the really big ones in Baroque music, and it's performed with splendid authority and an unrivaled sense of sheer joy.

This milestone of the Arcana catalogue returns with new artwork, new catalogue number (previously A330) and a new cover featuring ‘Boy with Flute’ by the Venetian painter Domenico Maggiotto. All the recorder concertos on this CD were written expressly for flauto or flautino and show the imagination, delicacy, freshness, virtuosity and sometimes even melancholy, which Vivaldi put into his writing for this instrument.