Fossilium Catalogus i Animalia 122123

Virgin Classics invites you to enjoy the world premiere recording of Viviadi's Il Farnace in a version that Vivaldi prepared specially for the city of Ferrara in 1737-38 after its success in Venice. This is not only the first time the Ferrara version of Farnace has been recorded, but also the first time it has been heard, as the planned performances of 1738 were cancelled due to the local failure of the Vivaldi opera that preceded it, Siroe.

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms. She has even toured the US with Kanye West and appeared in the hit HBO series Mozart in the Jungle . . . Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigour.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel , a dialogue between the voice of the cello and the piano.

Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, pioneer of flight, anatomist, scientist - yet according to Vasari, Leonardo’s first job outside Florence was as a musician. “Music cannot be regarded other than as the sister of painting', said Leonardo, so for the 500th anniversary of his death in 2019, I Fagiolini and Martin Kemp offer reflections of his images in vocal music: aural Fantasia dei Vinci - art through the prism of music.