Europa Ogg

Sandrine Piau does it again or should I say she did it already! This collection of superb Handel arias from '96 could be considered an earlier version or forerunner of the recently released Handel Opera Seria, and certainly very complementary to it. The ensemble she plays with is different (Fabio Bondi and his charismatic Europa Galante players), possibly somewhat less refined from the "early music" style perspective but this consideration is blown away by the dramatic presence and the stellar precision of this non-pareil Baroque vocalist.

La virtù de’ strali d’Amore was the first of ten operas Cavalli wrote with librettist Giovanni Faustini. Set in Cyprus, the plot involves enchanted and pastoral elements, love and its thwarting, the counterpointing of Man and God, sorcery, revelation and ultimate resolution, all accomplished in a brilliant series of scenes. A follower of Monteverdi, Cavalli reveals the influence of the older man but also his own pronounced independence. Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante have become one of the most admired partnerships in the history of baroque music performance.

Preceded by a solemn prologue in which Iride admonishes mortals that they should not offend the gods, the story of Cavalli’s Didone comes to life thanks to numerous solo passages of highly varied character and structure, designed both for simple basso continuo support and for a more complex instrumental accompaniment, for five real parts which enjoy some independent moments and which create a diversion from the action or blend in with it in a wholly logical way, intensifying it in a studied, evocative manner.

The miracle is not that each succeeding disc of Vivaldi concertos by Europa Galante led by Fabio Biondi is as brilliant as the preceding discs. The miracle is not that for each succeeding disc that Biondi finds more first-rate Vivaldi concertos. The miracle is that, with so many gracefully charming, elegantly witty, and delightfully diverse concertos to chose from, that only Vivaldi's Four Seasons have become the musical wallpaper of elevators and airlines throughout the world.

Biondi surmises that Vivaldi wrote this way in aid of his teaching. There was a desire to promote and develop virtuosity – in his pupils of the Ospedale della Pietà As though the composer wished to draw attention to convention by absenting it from the works; and replacing it with styles and "devices" whose very newness emphasized the essence of the form and of Vivaldi's way of respecting it. Throughout, there is exceptional vigor (even for Vivaldi) and drive in the tutti (rarely unison) writing. Biondi directs Euoropa Galante extremely well to discern, internalize then express the structure (at the movement level) and also the sentencing within passages of each of the musical ideas.

Vivaldi was an innovator; that's a fact not always acknowledged so readily as it might be. These CD are full of examples of instrumental writing which broke new ground in the Venice of the start of the eighteenth century. The way in which the violin and organ interact in the central movement of the D minor concerto, RV541 [CD.2. tr.11], for example, was new. The exuberance of the solo passages for cello in the B Flat Major RV 547 [CD.1. tr.11] sound almost Beethovenian. Similarly the extent to which the violin is "encouraged" to stray well outside accepted melodic and rhythmic practice in the E Minor, RV 281 [CD.2 trs.1-3] has to be seen as pioneering at least; ingenious for sure. But at the same time, the playing here is never gratuitously eccentric.

[Violinist Fabio Biondi has a singular capacity for finding something new and exciting in the music of Antonio Vivaldi whenever he considers it, a prodigious feat which he demonstrates with Concerti per La Pietà, a new collection of works calling for a variety of demanding solo challenges, superbly met by Biondi and his colleagues from Europa Galante. In his Venetian years the well-spring of Vivaldi an inventiveness was fed by the composer working with one of the leading orchestras of early eighteenth-century Europe: the one at the Ospedale della Pietà, the charitable institution which took in, cared for –and educated – girls who had been orphaned or abandoned.[/quote]

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos, yet even this tiny sample of six, written during the composer’s visit to Prague between 1730 and 1731, demonstrates in every movement his genius of harmonic and dramatic surprise. Each concerto is startlingly original, from the opening movement of the E Minor RV 278 that pits daring solo passages against a hypnotic, pulsing orchestra, while the same concerto’s Largo even feels modern in its angularity. A more familiar Vivaldi can be heard in the C Major RV 186, with its Italianate innocence and winsome middle Largo. But whatever the composer’s mood, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante thrill to his ingenuity at every step.

Sweet, intimate, and very dry, Fabio Biondi's of Boccherini's Guitar Quintets with players from Europa Galante and guitarist Giangiacomo Pinardi is ineffably charming, but possibly too etiolated for some taste. But it has the feel of polished oak and such a wonderfully evocative sense of place and time that it is hard not to fall for Biondi and Boccherini. Much of the appeal, of course, is Boccherini's music: filled with luminous light and most tender affection, Boccherini is the chamber music equivalent of the young Goya, and it would take a hard heart not to be beguiled by Boccherini's La ritirata di Madrid or swept up in his wonderfully stylized Fandango. Biondi and Europa Galante may be fay, but they match the music's delicate delights. Virgin's sound is close but with a sense of space around it.