Music of The French Baroque il Giardino Armonico

inaugurated Cecilia Bartoli’s first season as Artistic Director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in 2012. “Bartoli’s Dream Start with Dream Voices” wrote the Vienna Kurier of this uproarious Moshe Leiser/Patrice Caurier in which Bartoli heads a hand-picked cast including Andreas Scholl, Philippe Jaroussky and Anne Sofie Von Otter with Il Giardino Armonico conducted by Giovanni Antonini. “[Andreas Scholl’s] coloratura is note perfect, he phrases recitatives with as much musicianship as arias, and the steadiness and purity of his voice are remarkable.” The Financial Times

After the violin and bassoon, Vivaldi apparently like the cello best as a solo instrument. Because while the Italian Baroque master wrote somewhere over 200 violin concertos and 39 bassoon concertos, he also wrote 28 cello concertos. Part of his special affection may come from the fact that Vivaldi himself seems to have invented the genre. Although there had been passages for solo cello in earlier composers' works, Vivaldi apparently wrote the first actual concertos featuring the cello throughout. This disc, the first in Naïve's Vivaldi's Edition's releases of all the concertos played by Christophe Coin with Il Giardino Armonico led by Giovanni Antonini, is an easy winner.

The project to record all of the 450-odd works by Vivaldi held by the National University Library of Turin proceeds apace. It only seems yesterday that I was reviewing the opera "Orlando Furioso". For that set a very radical band of period performers was chosen, the Ensemble Matheus. L’Astrée – a Turin group in spite of its French name – are less radical in the sense that they don’t make their instruments rasp and bite, but I would say no less imaginative. With the help of a really lifelike recording – the instruments truly seemed to be in my listening room – the music just leaps off the page.

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.