Sardelli Vivaldi

In his definitive study of the composer's life and work, Michael Talbot spoke of the prospect of 'perpetual discovery' in respect of Vivaldi, resulting from a neglect spanning centuries. 'Scarcely a year passes,' he wrote in 1978, 'without the announcement of some fresh discovery'. This CD gives an excellent example of what we might expect even now, 30 years after Talbot's study, with a collection of new finds from just the last year and a half!

Naïve are delighted to announce the world premiere recording of 'Orlando Furioso', the 1714 version. It scored a huge success at the Teatro San Angelo in Venice, where it was directed by none other than Vivaldi and his father. The manuscript, rediscovered 250 years later in Vivaldi’s personal library, now in Turin, was thought to be a revision of an existing 'Orlando' of 1713 by Bolognese composer Ristori.

This is the 45th title in the Vivaldi Edition, 3 years after the first recording dedicated to Vivaldi scores discovered in Europe between 2000 and 2007, now in its 12th year. This second volume features the most recent discoveries in world premiere recordings and will further contribute to complete one of the most fascinating jigsaw puzzles in musical history Federico Maria Sardelli is a member of the musicological committee of the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, for which he has published numerous scholarly essays. In July 2007 Peter Ryom chose him to continue his monumental work of cataloguing the music of Antonio Vivaldi; since then, Sardelli has been the editor of the Vivaldi Werkverzeichnis (RV).

The so-called “Anna Maria Partbook” consists of an elegantly bound volume in red leather containing the violin parts of 31 violin concertos, of which 26 are by Antonio Vivaldi. It was the personal repertoire of Vivaldi's most gifted pupil, the famous “Anna Maria della Pietà”, who played also the viola d'amore, the mandolin, the theorbo, and the harpsichord. Anna Maria's partbook represents an extraordinary collection of violin concerts of high virtuosity.

The so-called “Anna Maria Partbook” consists of an elegantly bound volume in red leather containing the violin parts of 31 violin concertos, of which 26 are by Antonio Vivaldi. It was the personal repertoire of Vivaldi's most gifted pupil, the famous “Anna Maria della Pietà”, who played also the viola d'amore, the mandolin, the theorbo, and the harpsichord. Anna Maria's partbook represents an extraordinary collection of violin concerts of high virtuosity.

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.

Naïve are delighted to announce the world premiere recording of 'Orlando Furioso', the 1714 version. It scored a huge success at the Teatro San Angelo in Venice, where it was directed by none other than Vivaldi and his father. The manuscript, rediscovered 250 years later in Vivaldi’s personal library, now in Turin, was thought to be a revision of an existing 'Orlando' of 1713 by Bolognese composer Ristori. However, the musicologists in charge of the numbering of the works of Vivaldi, Peter Ryom and his successor Federico Maria Sardelli, wondered why Vivaldi should have kept this music in his personal corpus among all his other scores, and noticed that the manuscript featured many different hands and numerous pasted-in corrections of the parts.