Liszt Ference Chanber Orchestra Vivaldi

Gérard Lesne founded the Il Seminario musicale Ensemble in 1985. Since 1990, the Ensemble has been in residence at the Royaumont Foundation, where it attracts vocalists and instrumentalists who share Lesne's enthusiam for the 17th and 18th century Italian repertoire. The musicians perform on old instruments and strive to reproduce as faithfully as possible the lilt and narrative line characteristic of the baroque style as expressed in works by composers such as Monteverdi, Cavalli, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Caldara, Pergolesi, and the others. The size of the ensemble is variable depending on the repertoire. Based on a rich and varied continuo section (theorbo, cello, basson, double bass, organ and harpsichord) supporting one or more soloists, it can be expanded with the addition of a string quartet to make a small chamber orchestra suitable for performing chamber operas.

In 1718 Vivaldi entered the employment of Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt who had been appointed governor of Mantua, then part of the Austrian Empire. His responsibilities seem to have been varied but probably the most important of them was to provide operas for his employer’s court. One of these was Tito Manlio, which was produced for the Mantuan Carnival season in 1719; and, if we are to believe a note by Vivaldi himself at the head of the score, written in the space of five days.

Suite italienne is the brainchild of violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha – his second album on Linn – and the Swiss ensemble CHAARTS Chamber Artists. With Italy as the common thread through each of the three works, the riotous programme includes the premiere recording of Sollima’s TYCHE, a violin concerto that was composed specifically for Jonian. Echoing Jonian and Sollima’s mixed roots, the work absorbs musical ideas from different sources and, as the title suggests, reflects on the Greek goddess of fate, or the Italian equivalent Fortuna, and the ambivalence of life itself.

Bach’s concertos for multiple harpsichords and orchestra are beloved by some and drive others crazy. Perhaps no other music so graphically illustrates Beecham’s famous description of the sound of the solo instrument as “two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.” The performers must exercise great care in selecting instruments that are not too “clangy” sounding, and the recording has to balance a need for warmth and roundness of tone with contrapuntal clarity. In fact, most of this music was originally composed for melody instruments (violin and oboe, principally), and Naxos has obligingly reconstructed the original versions on another disc in this excellent series.

This is the 51st title in the Vivaldi Edition and the 6th volume, out of approximately 12, of the series dedicated to the violin concertos whose manuscripts are held in the National Library of Turin. Following two successful volumes of concertos for solo violin and orchestra recorded separately in the Vivaldi Edition, virtuosos Riccardo Minasi and Dmitry Sinkovsky now join forces to record pyrotechnic concertos for two violins and orchestra.

Suite italienne is the brainchild of violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha – his second album on Linn – and the Swiss ensemble CHAARTS Chamber Artists. With Italy as the common thread through each of the three works, the riotous programme includes the premiere recording of Sollima’s TYCHE, a violin concerto that was composed specifically for Jonian. Echoing Jonian and Sollima’s mixed roots, the work absorbs musical ideas from different sources and, as the title suggests, reflects on the Greek goddess of fate, or the Italian equivalent Fortuna, and the ambivalence of life itself.

Few people nowadays seriously believe Vivaldi wrote the same concerto five hundred times. But the view that there is little variety in Vivaldi's oeuvre is still widely held. Louis T. Vatoison, in the programme notes to this recording, has a strongly different perception: "a Vivaldi concerto must (…) be seen as an individual 'snapshot', whose instrumental layout or formal structure implicitly reveal at what period, and sometimes even for whom it was written". The music on this disc gives ample evidence for this view.

Naxos intend to record Vivaldi’s entire orchestral corpus, and Raphael Wallfisch’s integral four-disc survey of the 27 cello concertos inaugurates this visionary, though plainly Herculean undertaking. Soloist and orchestra employ modern instruments; director Nicholas Kraemer contends that authentic protocols can be ably met by contemporary ensembles and, in articulation, style and ornamentation, these pristine, engaging readings have little to fear from period practitioners. Wallfisch’s pointed, erudite and spirited playing is supported with enlightened restraint by the CLS, directed from either harpsichord or chamber organ by Kraemer, whose sensitive continuo team merits high praise throughout. Without exception, these Concertos adopt an orthodox fast-slow-fast three-movement format. Wallfisch, dutifully observant in matters of textual fidelity, plays outer movements with verve, energy and lucidity, such that high-register passagework, an omnipresent feature of these works, is enunciated with the pin-sharp focus of Canaletto’s images of 18th-century Venice, which adorn the covers of these issues.

Antonio Vivaldi composed Arsilda, Regina di Ponto for the Venetian theater of Sant'Angelo in the fall of 1716. While Vivaldi had, by its debut, been an important member of Venetian musical culture for over a decade as a violinist and composer, he had begun composing only three years earlier. Domenico Lalli, his librettist, who settled in Venice in 1710 after fleeing his native Naples upon being charged with embezzlement, was one of the most important librettists of the first decades of the eighteenth century.