If you want a good idea of why Luca Marenzio (1553-99) was considered madrigalist during the late-16th century, the music and performances on this fine recording will provide a good starting place. The richly colorful vocal writing–and equally colorful texts!–are ideally illustrated by the tightly focused intonation, reedy timbre, and knowing inflections of the Concerto Italiano’s seven singers. Sampling from Marenzio’s five- and six-part madrigals, the ensemble avoids any temptation to over-state the music’s case with exaggerated accents or heavy-handed phrasing and dynamics (a common fault of less-competent groups). Instead, they trust the composer’s keen sense of text-setting and allow expressive effects to arise naturally from the score.

If you're familiar with Alessandrini and his sparkling period instrument ensemble you expect interpretations featuring rhythmic drive, colorful playing, and original insights. Those characteristics are what help make this version of Bach's perennial and oft-recorded Brandenburg Concertos so compelling. Tempos are generally on the fast side, but never overly swift, while slow movements have just the right touch of soulfulness. Virtually without exception, the solo bits are done with imaginative, fluent expertise, and Gabriele Cassone's rendition of the famous trumpet part of the Second Brandenburg provides musical thrills, as well as virtuoso ones. Alessandrini himself takes us on a wild ride through the Fifth Concerto's brilliant harpsichord cadenza.

Boris Begelman, the highly acclaimed leader of Concerto Italiano, frequently takes on the role of soloist in the many concerts that Rinaldo Alessandrini’s celebrated orchestra devotes to the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. High time then for Begelman to take centre stage in one of the Vivaldi Edition’s solo violin recordings. This ninth concerto volume sees the welcome return of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s ensemble, which already features in thirteen albums of the Vivaldi collection. In this purely instrumental repertoire they excel as much as they do in vocal music, deploying generously sweeping melodic lines, inspired dynamics, and a musical language already mastered to perfection yet always interpreted anew.

Two musical titans in the classical world, award-winning Italian bass Lorenzo Regazzo and Italian conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini, are brought together once again to record the greatest operatic arias by George Frederic Handel. Handel, one of the most celebrated operatic composers of the eighteenth century, always remained out of step with the preferences of his era - notably his attachment to the 'natural' male voice in a time when the high voices of women or castratos triumphed everywhere.

The concertos for strings are a very special genre in Vivaldi's output. Contrary to the concertos for solo instruments, those offer a real balance and amazing range of colours between all the intruments concerned. Following a very successful first volume, released in 2004, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano offer a new milestone recording in Vivaldi's instrumental music, full of colours and refinement.

Italian Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio was internationally recognized as the leading composer of madrigals at the height of his career, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. He was so popular (and the sales of his music so lucrative) that within years of his death, both Flemish and German publishers had issued volumes of his complete five and six part madrigals, an honor almost unheard of at the time. Marenzio's madrigals, while anticipating the songlike lyricism of monody that would come to dominate vocal music of the early Baroque, made full use of the textural and expressive qualities of Renaissance polyphony.

This talented Italian vocal ensemble, under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini, has already proved its excellence in previous discs of Monteverdi madrigals. In this engaging new release the artists turn their attention to ‘madrigal comedies’ by 16th-century Alessandro Striggio and his younger contemporary, Adriano Banchieri. These are highly entertaining, often witty pieces, with a strong onomatopoeic element and a profusion of vividly depictive images running through them.

Armida is the tenth opera in the Vivaldi Edition; it's the second one to be recorded by Rinaldo Alessandrini (their first was L’Olimpiade). It's a great success. Marking the end of Vivaldi's first period in Venice, it lacks music for Act II. Alessandrini has reconstructed it here using carefully chosen existing music of the composer with the assistance of the musicologist Frédéric Delaméa.

La célèbre épopée biblique relatant le meurtre d’Abel par Caïn est connue de tous, mais la mise en scène qu’Alessandro Scarlatti lui a dédiée l’est beaucoup moins. Thème récurant pour les oratorios italiens au XVIIe siècle, le sujet est traité ici à la manière d’une histoire policière. Avec un effectif musical réduit, il nous transporte dans un univers baroque étourdissant. Les accents lyriques sont d’une expressivité rare tandis que l’orchestre, faisant preuve de beaucoup de psychologie, exulte. Par bonheur, la prise de son est à l’avenant. Les divers plans sonores sont respectés avec une très belle transparence et une foule de détails sur les voix et sur les instruments.

Three serenatas by Vivaldi survive (he is known to have composed at least eight)‚ of which La Senna festeggiante is by far the most enjoyable…One of the work’s most interesting features is Vivaldi’s deliberate use in places of elements of French style‚ for instance in the solemn ‘ouvertur’ which opens Part 2 and the courtly minuet of The Golden Age’s second aria‚ thereby adding to the richness of a work which for the most part is vintage Vivaldi at his most buoyant and irresistible.

Fireworks, virtuosity and bravura pieces are essential ingredients of Vivaldi’s concerto oeuvre. Discover or rediscover Vivaldi’s concertos played by the most prestigious artists.

Gloriously alert and full-bodied playing produces a disc that is just waiting to be enjoyed… The music is unmistakably , of course, but ranges from brilliant violin figuration to creamy slow-drawn chords, and from vocal transcriptions to short fugues (and what enjoyable fugues, too!). The cumulative effect of it all is like visiting a workshop and finding there examples of all the things an artist might do when freed from the demands of a particular public. ’s performances cannot be faulted. has a knack for vital and exciting music-making that is utterly straightforward and free from overworked mannerism. It is a difficult balance to achieve, but here it is allied to playing that is gloriously alert and full-bodied. This disc is just waiting to be enjoyed, so go on – it might bring you closer to as well!

Extraordinarily, Alessandro Scarlatti (who died in 1725 and forms a strong bridge between the mature Baroque and later classical traditions, according to musicologist Edward Dent) wrote some sixty-four operas, twenty oratorios, hundreds of chamber cantatas, and a host of madrigals, masses, motets, toccatas, concertos, sonatas and symphonies. Very little of this is heard today, sadly, except in specialist circles. Perhaps one of the more popularly performed pieces is 'Abramo, il tuo sembiante' (a Christmas cantata). When Handel visited Italy between 1706 and 1710, he met Scarlatti and may even have studied with him. This performance of said cantata is well within the Italian style - clear lines and intricate ornamentation.

The arias, duets, recitatives and overtures in this recording are not grouped according to a set theme or singing style: heroic tenors, rival queens or famous castrati. Instead, if the sleeve-notes are to be believed, soprano Sandrine Piau, contralto Sara Mingardo and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini set out simply to enjoy themselves by performing favourite works from across Handel’s operatic output. Their only rules were to omit the very famous numbers - ‘Cara sposa’ from Rinaldo, for example, is not included - maintain a sense of mood contrast, and to include opening recitatives as a means of placing the characters within the dramatic context of each opera.