Giardino Armonico Bach

Naïve releases the third volume dedicated to Vivaldi’s violin concertos in its ground breaking project, the Vivaldi Edition. Multi award-winning violinist Duilio Galfetti is accompanied by acclaimed early music ensemble I Barocchisti under the direction of Diego Fasolis.

A native of Buenos Aires but of Italian origin and living in Italy, Evangelina Mascardi regularly collaborates as a continuo-player with pre-eminent ensembles: Il Giardino Armonico dir. Giovanni Antonini, Zefiro, dir. Alfredo Bernardini, Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, dir. Sir John Eliot Gardiner… A former pupil of Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, she has two solo albums to her credit (ORF Austria), the first of which, devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss, won the Diapason d’or. Now she inaugurates her collaboration with Arcana with a programme of refined and original theorbo solos, theorbo and tiorbino duos, and songs by the Modena-born Bellerofonte Castaldi, one of his era’s finest theorbo virtuosos.

The Donne Barocche, or Baroque Women, featured here are not singers or operatic characters, but composers, and the album, originally released on the Opus 111 label in 2001 and rescued for reissue by Naïve broke new ground when it first appeared. All of the music comes from the last third of the 17th century and the first decade of the 18th. The names of composer/singer Barbara Strozzi and French keyboardist Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre were known to enthusiasts of the history of women's music and were beginning to receive mainstream performances, but the other four composers represented were new to all but scholars, and the big news was a program of music as varied in concept and affect as any by the male composers of the period.

A native of Buenos Aires but of Italian origin and living in Italy, Evangelina Mascardi regularly collaborates as a continuo-player with pre-eminent ensembles: Il Giardino Armonico dir. Giovanni Antonini, Zefiro, dir. Alfredo Bernardini, Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, dir. Sir John Eliot Gardiner… A former pupil of Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, she has two solo albums to her credit (ORF Austria), the first of which, devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss, won the Diapason d’or. Now she inaugurates her collaboration with Arcana with a programme of refined and original theorbo solos, theorbo and tiorbino duos, and songs by the Modena-born Bellerofonte Castaldi, one of his era’s finest theorbo virtuosos.