The title of this CD Bellezza Crudel means ‘beautiful cruelty’ and the music reflects the Venetian tradition of masquerade and intrigue. This is undoubtedly Vivaldi’s world, one of heartfelt, musical intensity ably realised by Tone Wik on this delightful collection of four Cantatas, interspersed with two Concertos.

Vivaldi’s lively and engaging earlier works need virtuoso playing – and here receive it… Like most composers of his time, Vivaldi began his publishing career with sonatas. His sonatas, although just as strongly marked by his distinctive musical personality, are played much less today than his admittedly more numerous concertos. The six here, not in fact from the published sets, are utterly unlike the familiar Corelli sonata model: no serene, rationally worked-out counterpoint, but brilliant violinistic gestures and capricious changes of texture, pace and mood…What they need is two violinists who are lively virtuosos, able to imitate each other closely, match exactly in articulation (or inexactly, if they choose) and frolic happily in thirds or sixths high on the E string (as required a good deal in the finales of RV68 and 70). Certainly that’s what they get here.

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.

This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way devoted to making Vivaldi out as a rebel in his time.

Vivaldi, the Venetian, master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately-recognisable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colours and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes.

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.

For fans of Il Giardino Armonico's flamboyant flourishes and exuberant expressiveness, it's like having all your birthdays at once, being presented with this great Warner Classics 11 CD set. My own feeling is that this "free" approach to Baroque music is at its best when applied to the theatrical music of disc 8 or the seventeenth century Italian music on disc 1. The showmanship and playfulness is an absolute joy in many of those pieces. I'm less satisfied with the interpretations of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, (on discs 10 and 11), which require a different approach, I feel. I like my Bach to be a little more measured and subtle, I suppose. It has no need of the Il Giardino Armonico treatment. On the whole, though, I do love this set and wouldn't be without it.

Supreme master of the Baroque concerto and one of the finest composers of sacred music, Vivaldi is now also being rediscovered as an opera composer of genius. Some credit for this must go to Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco, whose performances of Giustino since 1985 have made this colourful and dramatic work the most widely played of Vivaldi's operas in modern times. Giustino contains an endless flow of Vivaldian melodic inspiration and inventive orchestration; the score calls for a psaltery and for birdsong, while the goddess Fortune descends to the tune of Spring from the Four Seasons. This first recording is based on a concert performance in Rotterdam in 2001; the fine cast is headed by Dominique Labelle as the empress Arianna and Francesca Provvisionato as the plough-boy emperor Giustino.

The young Russian soprano makes her solo debut on Decca with cantatas by Handel, Mozart, Porpora and Vivaldi which showcase her scintillating coloratura, tonal clarity and warmth, and radiant middle register; Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini accompany with panache.

Quebec contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux scored a top rating on her earlier Analekta disc of Handel Italian cantatas, and in that review I expressed a desire for more recordings from this sensational young singer. If you enjoyed the Handel program (and if you don't have it, get it), you'll be just as happy with this new disc that combines two famous Baroque solo-vocal works with some engaging, relentlessly upbeat orchestral selections from the same period. Lemieux continues to impress with her warm, true-contralto tone, fluid legatos, canny phrasing, and total command of the technical aspects of these justifiably popular yet challenging works.

Die Extreme von Schönheit und Virtuosität hat Dorothee Oberlinger in dieser Aufnahme versucht sehr kunstvoll zu vereinen und so gibt diese CD nicht nur einen guten Einblick in ihr bravouröses Können, sondern beleuchtet auch die Werke Vivaldis in ihren mannigfaltigen Schattierungen. Dabei wird auf vordergründige Effekte verzichtet zugunsten der „schillernden Palette“ unterschiedlichster Affekte in Vivaldis Musik.

The four works presented here were written for the Ospedale della Pietà, the female orphanage where Vivaldi taught voice and violin. Although the scores for the two choral works on this recording, the Gloria and the Magnificat, are written for the traditional four voices from soprano to bass, we must wonder who could have supplied the tenor and bass voices for concerts given by the orphans. Boys were not admitted to the orphanage, and there were very few men among its staff. In his notes for this recording, conductor Matthias Maute states that the tenor and bass parts were sung by the girls of the Ospedale. Michael Talbot, who has written extensively on Vivaldi’s life and sacred music, agrees with this assertion. According to Talbot, the tenor line would have been sung at the written pitch, while the bass line would have been sung an octave higher.

Following Ensemble Caprice’s first recording of Vivaldi’s sacred music (Gloria! Vivaldi and his Angels) we return to Vivaldi’s Venice and find ourselves yet again within the confines of the Ospedale della Pietà orphanage where, beginning in 1703, Vivaldi, the Red Priest, not only taught the orphan girls violin and singing, but also composed many of his most dazzling concertos as well as a substantial part of his highly inspired corpus of sacred music.

The most beautiful arias from the Vivaldi Edition: La verità in cimento, Juditha Triumphans, L'Olimpiade, Orlando finto pazzo. The album includes outstanding singers and arias that were sensational discoveries when first introduced in this series.

The project to record all of the 450-odd works by Vivaldi held by the National University Library of Turin proceeds apace. It only seems yesterday that I was reviewing the opera "Orlando Furioso". For that set a very radical band of period performers was chosen, the Ensemble Matheus. L’Astrée – a Turin group in spite of its French name – are less radical in the sense that they don’t make their instruments rasp and bite, but I would say no less imaginative. With the help of a really lifelike recording – the instruments truly seemed to be in my listening room – the music just leaps off the page.