Fossilium Catalogus i Animalia 122123

On her second PENTATONE album Maria & Maddalena, star soprano Francesca Aspromonte explores the Two Marys in oratorios by Lulier, Bononcini, Leopoldo I d’Asburgo, Caldara, Perti, Handel and Scarlatti, partly in new editions, documenting the extremely bloom of the genre in the years around 1700. She performs these works together with violinist Boris Begelman as well as the seasoned players of I Barocchisti under the baton of the eminent Diego Fasolis. Traditionally seen as two feminine opposites, with far-reaching moral implications, Aspromonte brings the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene together as two beautiful and strong women who turned their lives upside down by making the choice to dedicate themselves completely to an ideal. Her interpretation of these exceptional pieces explores all the emotions of the Two Marys, constituting a fascinating and profoundly moving portrait of what it means to be a woman.

Visitors to Venice had borne witness to Vivaldi’s prowess as a violinist, although some found his performance more remarkable than pleasurable. He certainly explored the full possibilities of the instrument, while perfecting the newly developing form of the Italian solo concerto. He left nearly five hundred concertos. Many of these were for the violin, but there were others for a variety of solo instruments or for groups of instruments, including a score of such works for solo flute or recorder, with strings and harpsichord. He claimed to be able to compose a new work quicker than a copyist could write it out, and he clearly coupled immense facility with a remarkable capacity for variety within the confines of the three-movement form, with its faster outer movements framing a central slow movement.

A couple of the concertos included here, RV 452 and RV 446, were only discovered in the 1960's, and while there is a discussion in the notes about their provenance (they "differ slightly, in terms of style, from what is generally regarded as undoubtedly authentic Vivaldi"), they have been accepted as having come from the master's pen. In any case, Heinz Holliger and I Musici perform these small masterpieces to perfection. The allegro of RV 463 exemplifies the glorious sound produced by I Musici - big, lush and swinging - and a modern musical approach that now ironically may be somewhat out of fashion.

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.