Thibault Noally and Les Accents present a celebration of the Venetian Sonata. The term sonata was first coined at the end of the 16th century by Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli but it was Tartini, born and active in the Venetian Republic, who created some 200 sonatas for violin, the largest body of work in the form, followed by Vivaldi with 80. If Vivaldi borrowed from all an sundry [Caldara, Corelli, Matteis, Bonporti, Albinoni] then others were quick to borrow from him too and the Venetian sonata spread through competing musicians to Germany, via Pisendel and the Dresden court; France with Leclair and Guignone; and Russia with the Venetians Madonis and Dall'Oglio. Thibault Noally is a recognised name on the international baroque stage. He best-known as the solo violin of Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble with Marc Minkowski, with the Concerto Köln, Pulcinella or the Ensemble Matheus.

Alongside the famous Quattro Stagioni, La Notte, and so on, Vivaldi wrote no fewer than 27 concertos for the cello – an instrument which at the time was generally limited to playing basso continuo. With the genuine virtuosi he had available to him at the Ospedale della Pietà, the Red Priest played a key role in the emancipation of the cello, which so readily inspired him to invent varied figuration. The musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin have chosen to add highly expressive pieces by Caldara to punctuate the sumptuous feast of sound offered by maestro Queyras.

Venice was one of the most fertile centres of Italian Baroque music. The serenity of its inhabitants and their immoderate taste for celebration, carnivals, entertainment and pleasure were the envy of the whole of Europe, as were the beauty of the city and its fine situation, its prestige and its magnificence. In the City of the Doges music was a necessity. ‘There are concerts somewhere almost every evening,’ wrote the French scholar and politician Charles de Brosses in 1740.

LA VOIX DES RÊVES - Greatest Moments in Concert” (available on DVD & Blu Ray) features video footage from a number of occasions and venues – including items from a concert given among the crystal chandeliers of the splendid Galerie des Glaces in the palace of Versailles, and works by Handel and Vivaldi performed in another jewel of French Baroque architecture, the sumptuously decorated Chapelle de la Trinité in Lyon.

The delightfully unusual disc Alla turca takes its initial inspiration from the failed 1683 siege of Vienna by the Turks and never looks back. The music explored here belongs to the Holy Roman Empire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an empire that celebrated both the arms that held back the Islamist hordes, and the more gentle arts of music that several Emperors personally studied. Alla turca brings a seldom-heard Baroque repertory to life in vivid musical color.

Retrouvailles importantes pour l'histoire de l'opéra que cet enregistrement de la première Clemenzo di Tito, l'un des plus fameux livrets de Pietro Metastasio, immortalisé par Mozart et Gluck. Antonio Caldara, le " Bach italien" installé à Vienne à la cour de Charles VI après une carrière à Barcelone, est un jalon musical essentiel entre Scarlatti, Porpora et les classiques viennois. Il partagera avec Metastasio, poète lauréat, le devant de la scène autrichienne pendant vingt ans. A l'écoute de certains numéros de cette oeuvre donnée le 4novembre 1734 dans des décors de Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, on comprend l'impact de Caldara comme compositeur lyrique…

Gaetano Nasillo has two multi-awarded recordings on Zig Zag Territoires to his credit, both of them devoted to the Neapolitan school: the Cello Sonatas of Salvatore Lanzetti and an anthology of Concerti Napoletani, with Chiara Banchini and her Ensemble 415. Now he inaugurates his collaboration with Arcana with a programme of eight Sonatas for solo cello and continuo by the Venetian-born Antonio Caldara, composed five years before the publication of the famous cello sonatas of the most famous Venetian, Antonio Vivaldi. Written eighteen months before his death, these pages represent a substantial contribution to the late baroque repertoire of sonatas for solo cello.

Countertenor Philippe Jaroussky continues to amaze with the facility of his technique in the most demanding coloratura repertoire, the intelligence and deep feeling of his musicianship, and, most especially, with the full, vibrant quality of his distinctive voice. It has lost none of its freshness since he burst onto the international scene in the last years of the 20th century, and has become a richer, stronger instrument without giving up any of its remarkable agility. A champion of neglected Baroque composers, he turns his attention to Antonio Caldara (ca. 1671-1736), a near-contemporary of Vivaldi's.

This duo is a secret trio: while soprano Amaryllis Dieltiens and continuo player Bart Naessens are celebrating their 10th anniversary of ""Capriolo di Gioia"", there is a third, unmistakable protagonist: the sonorous claviorganum (combination of harpsichord and organ) played by Markus Harder-Völkmann, a very convincing representative of this rare instrument group. Dieltiens and Naessens show that the impressive keyboard instrument can be used in a variety of ways in the continuo to present colorful and powerful Italian music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Johann David Heinichens great cantata ""Là, dove in grembo al colle"" may also be counted as Italian music, as it was written in Italian style during his stay in Italy. Amaryllis Dieltien's soprano is the perfect completion; here she shines theatrically as well as lyrically.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra and a fine line-up of singers present a pasticcio setting of a libretto by Metastasio, with contributions from composers including Caldara, Vivaldi, Galuppi, Hasse and Paisiello. In the eighteenth century, 1,300 years after the last Olympic Games in ancient times, the Olympic theme was highly fashionable. Many composers based operas on the libretto L'Olimpiade by Metastasio. This recording has been structured to contain all of Metastasio’s original arias; it is a pasticcio in the sense that the music is by 16 different composers amongst the many that set the libretto between 1733 and the end of the century.

A hitherto little-known manuscript now in the Czech National Library contains a Missa defunctorum by Caldara that comprises the first three sections of the Requiem liturgy (the Introit, Kyrie and Sequence). Nothing is known about the origins of the music or how it ended up in Prague, but it probably dates from the Venetian’s long years of service at the Habsburg court in Vienna (and it is known that he deputised for his boss Fux at the coronation of Emperor Charles VI in Prague in 1723).

A printed version of the Motets for 2 or 3 voices Op. 4 was published in Bologna in 1715. Although Caldara was at this time still in the services of Marquis Ruspoli, he dedicated this collection to Cardinal Ottoboni who had gained a wide-ranging reputation as a patron of music during the previous decades. Caldara was appointed as imperial assistant music director in Vienna in 1716. As the favourite composer of Charles VI, Caldara was entrusted with the regular production of music for representative events at the imperial court for the remainder of his life.

ATMA Classique presents the debut recording of Le Nouvel Opéra, a Montreal-based company under the artistic leadership of soprano Suzie LeBlanc, with music director Alexander Weimann and stage director Marie Nathalie Lacoursiere. Their inaugural recording features Antonio Caldara’s oratorio La Conversione di Clodoveo, Rè di Francia — a work the company first performed in Potsdam in 2005, celebrating the the milennial anniversary of Christianity in Germany.

The oratorio as a musical form emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century as a kind of "spiritual exercise" encouraged by the Congregazione dell'Oratorio in Rome. The performances took place in oratories (prayer halls) constructed above church naves and were intended to be attractive but edifying entertainments. Then as later, oratorios generally reflected the popular forms and styles of secular music – and in late Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this meant opera, though based on religious rather than mythological and heroic themes. The most prolific composer in this genre was Antonio Caldara (c1670-1736); New Grove lists 43 oratorios (in addition to many operas) and there are probably more that have been lost, written for patrons in his native Venice, Rome, Florence, Mantua, and Vienna.

CANTATAS AND OPERAS – the twin pillars of secular vocal music of the baroque period. Few composers – though there are some notable exceptions – eschewed these genres if only because a set of cantatas, engraved or copied professionally and strategically dedicated, could be a comparatively inexpensive starting point for a career while opera lured with prospects of fame and fortune.
The Venetian-born Antonio Caldara (1670–1736) certainly was no exception. His set of twelve cantatas (Op. 3) appeared in 1699; his operas had been staged in theatres in Venice before his move to the court at Mantua in 1700. But with his appointment as maestro da cappella to Francesco Maria Ruspoli, prince of Cerveteri, in Rome from mid-1709 and then as vice-Kapellmeister to the imperial court at Vienna from June 1716, he encountered environments that required intense concentration on the cantata in one and on opera in the other.