Vivaldi Naive Violin

This box set gathers all the violin concertos availa-ble in the Vivaldi Edition, plus Concerto Italianos benchmark recording of the red priest's most emblematic work: The Fours Seasons. A real 6-hour baroque violin feast!

The recordings of the Concerto Italiano under its leader Rinaldo Alessandrini, such as this 1997 release, electrified the authentic-performance movement in Italy. Alessandrini showed that performances of Vivaldi on authentic instruments could be edgy, brisk, even tough. The group's ensemble work was unmatched, but perhaps best of all was its command of the Baroque repertory; programming has consistently featured unusual works that, in performances, sound like they've always been part of the tradition. Included here are three examples of perhaps the most-neglected segment of Vivaldi's vast concerto output: his concertos for strings with no solo instrument.

In the summer of 2011 France’s most eminent cultural institution, the Château de Versailles, joined naïve in celebrating Antonio Vivaldi with a month of concerts, fireworks and publications – the crowning glory of our first ten years of work in restituting the massive corpus of works by this little-known italian composer to the public. The Vivaldi edition, a recording venture conceived by the italian musicologist Alberto Basso (istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte) and the independent label naïve, is one of the most ambitious recording projects of the twenty-first century. its principal objective is to record the massive collection of Vivaldi autograph manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca nazionale Universitaria in Turin.

Vivaldi, the Venetian: master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately recognizable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colors and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes. The contralto Delphine Galou (who recently won a Gramophone Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the classical music world) and Ottavio Dantone's Accademia Bizantina have created two recitals of sacred music and of opera that illustrate the incomparable richness of Vivaldi’s body of work and establish the emotional connections between the two repertoires.

Like each of its two predecessors in Naive's bizarrely costumed, irresistible Vivaldi bassoon concertos series, Sergio Azzolini and his back to the future original instrument crew find beauties in the music written for the bassoon that defy gravity. Interleaved with the haunting minor key songs and harmonies are courtly B flat expressions of affection and pleasure. The recordings, made at the Church of the Madonna della Formigola, Cortifella Pieve, Brescia, are audiophile as always. The great notes by Sergio Azzolini are titled Mystery of the Bassoon. The bassoon is in fact the instrument assigned the largest number of solo concertos after those written for the violin, the composer's own instrument.

Over the past ten years, thanks in part to the stimulus of the Vivaldi Edition project, several manuscripts by Vivaldi have surfaced in different countries. Federico Maria Sardelli has decided to record the finest of them. So this recording does indeed present new works by Vivaldi. The content is very diverse, ranging from a motet, which is performed by the mezzo-soprano Romina Basso, to an Oboe Concerto, a Recorder Concerto, arias and other gems. There is a clear pattern to these discoveries. Almost all come from peripheral sources, and most appear to originate from special commissions at the margin of the composer’s activity.

Thirty-seven completed and two unfinished bassoon concertos, more than for any other instrument except the violin; Vivaldi must have had one terrific fagottista in that ospedale . Well, Sergio Azzolino is pretty good, too.
Michael Talbot’s sensible notes observe that the bassoon concertos seem to come from the latter part of Vivaldi’s career, though, as with much of Vivaldi’s work, exact dating is seldom possible. He attributes this to a void in Italy between the fading of the dulcian from the standard instrumental ensemble and the slow introduction there of the Franco-German bassoon.