Italian Baroque

A celebration of instrumental Baroque splendour! This set present an anthology of Italian Baroque composers, featuring their instrumental output. Obviously the famous composers have their fair share: Vivaldi, Albinoni, Locatelli, Corelli, but also lesser known composers are featured: Barsanti, Bassani, Veracini, Nardini, Stradella, Vitali, Mancini, Platti, Legrenze and many more, over 30 composers! Performances by leading ensembles specialized in the Historically Informed Performance Practice: L'Arte dell'Arco/Federico Guglielmo, Ensemble Cordia/Stefano Veggetti, Violini Capricciosi/Igor Ruhadze, MusicaAmphion/Pieter Jan Belder and many more. A treasure trove of solo concertos, concerti grossi, sinfonias, overtures, trio sonatas and solo sonatas from the Golden Era of the Italian Baroque, era of joy, passion and brilliance!

A celebration of instrumental Baroque splendour! This set present an anthology of Italian Baroque composers, featuring their instrumental output. Obviously the famous composers have their fair share: Vivaldi, Albinoni, Locatelli, Corelli, but also lesser known composers are featured: Barsanti, Bassani, Veracini, Nardini, Stradella, Vitali, Mancini, Platti, Legrenze and many more, over 30 composers! Performances by leading ensembles specialized in the Historically Informed Performance Practice: L'Arte dell'Arco/Federico Guglielmo, Ensemble Cordia/Stefano Veggetti, Violini Capricciosi/Igor Ruhadze, MusicaAmphion/Pieter Jan Belder and many more. A treasure trove of solo concertos, concerti grossi, sinfonias, overtures, trio sonatas and solo sonatas from the Golden Era of the Italian Baroque, era of joy, passion and brilliance!

The 18th century was the golden age of the mandolin. The ensemble Artemandoline presents world premiere recordings of forgotten masterpieces written in Florence and Rome for mandolin and basso continuo. A music full of energy, beauty and virtuosity.

La Serenissima explore the network of friendships and collaborations that helped bring together German and Italian styles during the Baroque, with concertos by Telemann, Pisendel, Brescianello and others.

Early-music pioneers Charivari Agréable perform an engaging collection of overtures from Italian Baroque Opera, best described by Kah-Ming Ng as being “lucidly crafted for the purpose of turning heads”. In a decadent era when the antics of theatre-goers were often as intriguing as the performances taking place on stage, these works were composed with the express intention of thrilling, beguiling and engaging an often hard-to-impress audience.

Patricia Petibon, admired for her command of Baroque style, records her first album of Italian Baroque arias partnered by Andrea Marcon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Saluted by the International Record Review for her "rare ability to inject into her performance vocal characterizations which…nullify the need to see these operatic characters in the flesh," Rosso frames Petibon's gift of transformation by purely vocal means. Petibon's keen interpretive intelligence and gleaming tone summon into vivid life a wealth of characters tangled up in the power plays of gods, kings, witches, and devils. Rosso mixes beloved Handel airs like "Lascia ch'io pianga" with newly discovered arias by his contemporaries and predecessors. Sartorio's "Quando voglio" and Porpora's floating "Morte amara" are potential hits.

I Solisti Veneti is one of the first rank of small Italian chamber orchestras with modern instruments. Founded in Padua in 1959 by Claudio Scimone, it has made a reputation especially with Italian Baroque music, recording many works by Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, Francesco Geminiani, Benedetto Marcello and Giuseppe Tartini. Giuliano Carmignola and Piero Toso were two of the soloists in the ensemble. The group has made over 300 recordings, many on the Erato record label. A number of these were first-ever recordings of works of Vivaldi, Albinoni and Rossini.

The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.

The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.