Diogenio Bigaglia, a composer who at present is unknown to most people, was active in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century, so he was a contemporary of the much better known Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, and, above all, Antonio Vivaldi, whose work shows several evident – and more or less explicit – references to Bigaglia’s production. So he turns out to be a composer who is worthy of interest not only for the intrinsic musical worth of his works, but also for the influence his activity may have had on musicians with whom we are more familiar; this is why musicologists have recently started showing an increasing interest in him.
Diogenio Bigaglia, a composer who at present is unknown to most people, was active in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century, so he was a contemporary of the much better known Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, and, above all, Antonio Vivaldi, whose work shows several evident – and more or less explicit – references to Bigaglia’s production. So he turns out to be a composer who is worthy of interest not only for the intrinsic musical worth of his works, but also for the influence his activity may have had on musicians with whom we are more familiar; this is why musicologists have recently started showing an increasing interest in him.
For several decades beginning in the 1950's I Musici was the leading ensemble specializing in Italian Baroque music, and their performances were standard-setting in their time. Their recordings still hold up exceptionally well even though approaches to early music, driven by the period instrument revolution, have changed somewhat since then.
Claudio Scimone once again conducts the extraordinary I Solisti Veneti enssemble, playing one of Vivaldi's more cheerful concertos for mandolin. When you listen to this recording you can dream of being walking through several small streets of Venice, feeling its characteristic humidity and the flavor of that fabulous historical city.