The SSO explore two incredible Vivaldi works this week with violinist Pascale Giguere for our first Baroque Series concert of the year. No other composer of similar prominence has experienced that kind of rebirth, and it’s unlikely that any ever will. By the 1950s, his music held a unique place in the canon: Antonio Vivaldi was acknowledged by scholars as one of the greatest and most influential classical musicians in history, but he was also seen by the listening public as fresh, mysterious, and unfamiliar. It was as if Vivaldi had been born a second time, and had a very short, implausibly prolific career.
The explosion of new work from Vivaldi-a relatively obscure musician whose influence had been long-acknowledged, but whose music had all but disappeared-gave his work a new public debut. The end result: 319 complete Antonio Vivaldi compositions that had been lost to the world for nearly two centuries. So when Turin University musicologist Alberto Gentili was presented with a box of incomplete, unsorted pages from hundreds of Vivaldi’s compositions, he began a ten-year investigation to hunt down the remaining pages and place them in their original order. Played by excellent Italian soloists: Manuel Staropoli as recorder soloist and a continuo group led by keyboard player Manuel Tomadin.While the name Vivaldi is a household classical name, its easy to forget that until the early 20th century his music had been completely forgotten.īy 1926, nearly all of Vivaldi’s work had been lost. This new recording presents Sonatas for the recorder by Venetian composers: Benedetto Marcello, Paolo Bellinzani and Antonio Vivaldi, music of great beauty and radiance, like the city it was born in, Venice, La Serenissima. Since the dawn of instrumental music, this instrument reveals remarkable success due to its simplicity, but also versatility in imitating the human voice. The recorder has a long history that closely links it to Venice. Many of his compositions were written for the female music ensemble of the. He has made several fine recordings for Brilliant Classics, and this is another jewel in his crown.’ His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Manuel Tomadin’s fine musicianship may be sampled on several previous Brilliant Classics releases such as the organ music of Krebs (BC95363), Lübeck (BC95453) and Erich, Druckenmüller and Saxer, reviewed in glowing terms by MusicWeb International: ‘Tomadin is an excellent interpreter, who has much feeling for German Baroque organ music. His best known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Staropoli is joined here not by a conventional harpsichord accompaniment but a lavishly appointed basso continuo section, whose members are also established members of Italy’s flourishing period-instrument scene. Having studied with luminaries of his instrument such as Bartold Kuijken and Dan Laurin, he is now a professor of Baroque flute himself at the Tartini Conservatoire in Triste. The texture of each concerto is varied, each resembling its respective season. Composed in 1723, The Four Seasons is Vivaldis best-known work, and is among the most popular pieces of Baroque music. This album marks Manuel Staropoli’s third album for Brillliant Classics, after well-received collections of Vivaldi trio sonatas (BC94173) and the complete royal consort music written by Robert de Visée (BC95595). The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a set of four violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. The works by Bellinzani make an especially attractive discovery: In their day his compositions enjoyed great popularity, for their unusual combination of learned counterpoint and sensitively moulded melody. The collections by Bellinzani and Marcello were among the first such dedicated to the recorder to be published in Italy each sonata within them follows a Corellian template of four brief movements alternating slow and fast tempi, lively in spirit whatever the speed.
Benedetto Marcello and the lesser-known Paolo Benedetto Bellinzani (1686 -1757) both composed stylish collections of sonatas for the Baroque flute which are excerpted here, interpolated with the arrangement of a concerto by Vivaldi, drawn from his ‘L’estro armonico’ collection and originally scored for two violins and orchestra. Venice supported a healthy industry of both recorder manufacture and music for the instrument during the 18th century. 18th-century Venetian sonatas for flute and recorder in opulently scored, historically informed performances.
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