Vittorio Baccelli

In the imposing Arena di Verona, soprano Sonya Yoncheva and tenor Vittorio Grigolo present with dramatic and passionate synergy an evening of the most beautiful operatic love arias and duets in opera history. Passion that burns, consumes and sometimes kills is the central theme of this concert including arias from Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod as well as from Puccini´s Tosca, La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Verdi´s La traviata, all conducted by Plácido Domingo. Sonya Yoncheva has the full and vibrant timbre of a true lyrical soprano while Vittorio Grigolo, like Cavaradossi and Rodolfo, plays the cards of ardor and passion, with sweet and affectionate colors. An overall successful evening.

Early in December 1787 Catherine II of Russia invited the famous composer to her court at St Petersburg where Italian opera was all the rage. A few days after his arrival the wife of the ambassador of Naples and Sicily died and Cimarosa was asked by him to compose a Requiem Mass for the funeral. Composers did not need to bother about being original in those days and Cimarosa could draw easily on a common stock of melodic ideas, but, nevertheless, his Mass is well shaped and certainly not a mere puce d'occasion.

Between 1680 and 1728, Marin Marais brought the pièce de viole to the peak of perfection. An ‘unremitting’ teacher, he was also the publisher of his own music and invented special signs to notate certain ornaments for the viol. In the course of his research at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Italian gambist Vittorio Ghielmi studied these manuscript codes, in the hand of Marais himself or his direct students. ‘This led me to a new vision of French Baroque music, which applies not only to the viola da gamba, but also to vocal and orchestral music. These signs reveal the technique of playing in action.

Vivaldi wrote Juditha Triumphans for the musically talented women of the Ospedale della Pieta, the Venetian orphanage with which he was associated on and off throughout most of his working life. The librettist, Giacomo Cassetti, described the work as a ''sacred military oratorio performed in times of war by the chorus of virgin singers, to be sung in the church of the Pieta''. The war was that into which Venice had entered against the Ottoman Empire and to which reference is made both in the body of the Latin text and in a ''Carmen Allegoricum'' which accompanied the text of the work's first performance.

This present CD recording of 12 Motets for 1, 2 & 3 Men’s Voices and Basso continuo of Giacomo Carissimi? might be best considered an oddity as much as an attempt to satisfy a curiosity. Since there are no existing autograph Motet manuscripts of Giacomo Carissimi, all manuscripts that have been transcribed by Consortium Carissimi are transcriptions themselves of Carissimi’s contemporaries. These transcriptions of both sacred and secular music come from Library Manuscripts or Early Printed Editions, consequently much if not all of this music has not been performed and heard since.

Pasquini’s golden era of dramatic composition was between the years of 1670 and 1680. Within the realm of the Oratorio genre, his creations were sought after outside the Roman circles. Performances were made in cities such as Florence, Modena, Naples and Vienna. An interesting annotation emerges from the correspondence of the Marquise of Ferrara, Ippolito Bentivoglio (studies done by Sergio Monaldini) in which Giacomo Zucchesini requests an Oratory be sung in Ferrara with a personal stipulation. E se si compiacesse ancora d’accompagnarlo con un altro di Bernardo Pasquini […] mi stimerei somma[men]te favorito. (And were it to be pleasing to have another one of Bernardo Pasquini, I would consider myself highly fortunate.)

Vittorio Ghielmi is known for the intensity and versatility of his musical interpretations and for his new approach to the viola da gamba and the sound of the early music repertoire. His ensemble, Il Suonar Parlante, is devoted to investigating early music repertoire and has also performed with jazz, flamenco and traditional Asian musicians.