This was the great collection of 12 varied and exciting violin concertos that turned Bach on to concerto writing. In fact, he transcribed several of these works for solo harpsichord, organ–even for harpsichords and orchestra. What fascinated him most was the balanced, three-movement form, the brilliance of the solo passages, the tunefulness of the music generally, and Vivaldi's seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of invention. When a composer ventured to publish a collection such as this, he was making a major statement. This is one of the really big ones in Baroque music, and it's performed with splendid authority and an unrivaled sense of sheer joy.

Gérard Lesne founded the Il Seminario musicale Ensemble in 1985. Since 1990, the Ensemble has been in residence at the Royaumont Foundation, where it attracts vocalists and instrumentalists who share Lesne's enthusiam for the 17th and 18th century Italian repertoire. The musicians perform on old instruments and strive to reproduce as faithfully as possible the lilt and narrative line characteristic of the baroque style as expressed in works by composers such as Monteverdi, Cavalli, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Caldara, Pergolesi, and the others. The size of the ensemble is variable depending on the repertoire. Based on a rich and varied continuo section (theorbo, cello, basson, double bass, organ and harpsichord) supporting one or more soloists, it can be expanded with the addition of a string quartet to make a small chamber orchestra suitable for performing chamber operas.

A shadowy, unstable and misanthropic character, died mysteriously from a knife wound inflicted by an unknown assailant, Jean-Marie Leclair is the real creator of the French violin school and one of the greatest violinists of the Eighteenth Century. His prolific output, almost exclusively devoted to the violin, consists of a series of collections of sonatas published throughout his lifetime, in which stand out 48 sonatas for violin and bass (four volumes). The First Book of Sonatas for Solo Violin with Basso Continuo dates from 1723 and represents Leclair’s first publication. Four sonatas are performed here by Fabio Biondi, one of the most authoritative Baroque performers, joined by an all-star continuo group featuring Rinaldo Alessandrini, Pascal Monteilhet and Maurizio Naddeo.

Fabio Biondi’s immense curiosity for characterful music – especially of forgotten scores from the Baroque – yields another fabulous surprise with Francesco Feo’s oratorio San Francesco di Sales. Feo’s reputation is at last starting to wax after having waned dramatically in the nineteenth century and thenceforward: in his own age he was compared very highly with Bach and Handel, and Charles Burney was moved to describe his vocal music as being “full of fire and invention and force in the melody and expression of the words”; Feo was also a boon companion of Pergolesi.

With this second contribution to the Vivaldi Edition, Fabio Biondi and his ensemble Europa Galante sign here the recording of the twentieth opera of the collection - a pasticcio in which Vivaldi ‘recycles’ hit tunes from the ‘World of Warcraft’ operas of his contemporaries.

In the course of his illustrious career, Fabio Biondi has nurtured a remarkable empathy with Italian music from across many centuries, but strikingly so with the early Baroque violin sonata repertory, the development of which was dramatically propelled into the future by Arcangelo Corelli with his Op 5 collection. It is this empathy possessed by Biondi which has inspired the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome (from its bowed instrument collection) to make him a loan of the precious 1690 “Tuscan” violin made by Antonio Stradivari, for this Glossa recording.

Abandoned at the age of two months and taken in by the Ospedale della Pietà, Chiara (or Chiaretta) rose – within that enclosed charitable institution in Venice – to become one of the leading European violinists of the middle of the 18th century. No stranger to such acclaim himself from two and a half centuries later, Fabio Biondi, on his first release for Glossa, has devised a programme drawing on the personal diary of this remarkable musician – taught by Antonio Vivaldi, and later a virtuoso soloist on the violin as well as the viola d’amore – of concertos and sinfonias by composers who, like the prete rosso, taught at the Pietà: Porta, Porpora, Martinelli, Latilla, Perotti and Bernasconi are all musicians whose compositions charm and delight as much today as they will have done in the time of Chiara.

Studio Armide represents magnificent documentary film Olivier Simonnet «Marc-Antoine Charpentier, un automne musical à Versailles». Marc-Antoine Charpentier never had an official function at the court of Louis XIV. In 2004 Versailles finally opened its doors to him for the tercentennial commemorations of his death. The finest performers of baroque music, from Jordi Savall to Christophe Rousset, played the most important works of the time in the Royal Chapel opera house, as well as in the chateau salons and galleries: from instrumental music (Lully’s Alceste) to vocal music (Actéon), from lyric tragedy (Médée) to sacred music (Missa assumpta est Maria). The life of this collaborator of Molière’s and cultural life under Louis XIV are enriched by the participation of conductors and musicians.

This production of Anna Bolena faithfully meets the musical vision proposed by Fabio Biondi. The mise-en-scène, therefore, excludes any explicit reference to the plot’s historical time, and the events have been set at the beginning of the 1800s, when Donizetti’s opera was premièred.

Richly colourful in Mozart and Vivaldi: Her velvety, versatile timbre makes mezzo-soprano Elına Garanča one of the outstanding singers of the present day, of that there can be no doubt. She followed up her international breakthrough at the Salzburg Festival with two celebrated CD releases in 2005 that laid the foundation of her rich discography: a Mozart recital and the world premiere of Vivaldi’s opera Bajazet. The present album combines the loveliest moments from these recordings.

Composed for the Carnival season in Verona in 1735, Bajazet is a ‘pasticcio’ opera based on the familiar story of the eponymous Turkish sultan’s imprisonment at the hands of the Tartar tyrant Tamerlane. As such, it openly uses arias by other composers, including Hasse, Broschi and Giacomelli, as well as re-cycled pieces from Vivaldi’s own operas (L’Olimpiade, Giustino, Farnace, Semiramide and Montezuma among them). But this is no mere patchwork of recycled numbers. All the ‘borrowed’ arias are expertly placed within the dramatic fabric of the work and are held together with richly composed recitatives. What we end up with is the best of the best in terms of Neapolitan-style opera – tuneful, virtuosic and passionate. Virtually every number in this recording is a highlight. What really lifts the recording is the quality of the performances. There are no holes or flaws among the experienced cast.

"Poro, re dell'Indie" (HWV 28) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The Italian-language libretto was adapted from Alessandro nell'Indie by Metastasio, and based on Alexander the Great's encounter with King Porus in 326 BC. The libretto had already been set to music by Leonardo Vinci in 1729 and by Antonio Vivaldi among others and was used as the text for more than sixty operas throughout the 18th century. The opera was first given at the King's Theatre in London on 2 February 1731 and on 15 further occasions. A run of 16 performances was a mark of success for the time as is the fact that the work was revived on 23 December 1731, and again in a revised form on 8 December 1736. It was also given in Hamburg and Brunswick.

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos, yet even this tiny sample of six, written during the composer’s visit to Prague between 1730 and 1731, demonstrates in every movement his genius of harmonic and dramatic surprise. Each concerto is startlingly original, from the opening movement of the E Minor RV 278 that pits daring solo passages against a hypnotic, pulsing orchestra, while the same concerto’s Largo even feels modern in its angularity. A more familiar Vivaldi can be heard in the C Major RV 186, with its Italianate innocence and winsome middle Largo. But whatever the composer’s mood, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante thrill to his ingenuity at every step.

This is the world-premiere recording of L’Oracolo in Messenia, an opera prepared by Vivaldi for Vienna and now reconstructed by Fabio Biondi. He leads this triumphant performance, which opened the 2011 Resonanzen festival in the Austrian capital with a high-powered cast including Ann Hallenberg, Vivica Genaux and rising soprano Julia Lezhneva.

La Santissima Annunziata est un oratorio d'Alessandro Scarlatti, écrit pour solistes (SSSAT) cordes et basse continue, créé à Rome au Palazzo della Cancelleria en 1700 ou 1703, sur un livret italien de Pietro Ottoboni.
Présenté pour la première fois le 3 avril 1700 au Palazzo della Cancelleria de Rome (résidence du cardinal) et repris postérieurement, au moins dans autres deux occasions : le 1er avril 1703 et le 25 mars 1708 (palazzo Ruspoli). Le fait qu'une annonce de la représentation de 1700 attribue la responsabilité de la musique à Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier, musicien attaché à Ottoboni, a fait douter sur le véritable auteur de celle-ci.