Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi VIVALDI Argippo

 

ARGIPPO

 

Fabio Biondi / Giangiacomo Pinardi PAGANINI Sonatas for Violin and Guitar

                                                SONATAS FOR VIOLIN AND GUITAR

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi VIVALDI Concerti per La Pietà

                                                       CONCERTI PER LA PIETÀ

Fabio Biondi THE 1690 "TUSCAN" STRADIVARI

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.

Another skill possessed by Biondi is his deft assemblage of programmes, whether for concert or for CD, and this new release of early eighteenth-century violin works touches on the impact that Corelli’s music had on music-making in Dresden, Venice, Padua, London and Amsterdam, to name just a few of the destinations affected as the fame of “Arcangelo Bolognese” fanned out from Rome across Europe.

With a continuo team from his Europa Galante ensemble (Antonio Fantinuoli, cello, Giangiacomo Pinardi, theorbo and Paola Poncet, harpsichord), Biondi plays sonatas by Vivaldi, Corelli, Geminiani, Tartini and Locatelli, and a Ciaccona by Veracini. Recorded in Rome, on an instrument which was originally made for the Florentine court of Ferdinando de’ Medici (and which, over time, has survived all manner of vicissitudes on its journey to Rome!), Fabio Biondi expertly captures the flavour of the eighteenth-century violin sonata.

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi GIUSEPPE VERDI Macbeth

A vivid demonstration of how widely Fabio Biondi’s musical imagination runs comes with his new recording of Giuseppe Verdi’s work of genius, Macbeth. It is the original Florentine 1847 version of the work, shorn of the Paris revisions more typically found on record, which Fabio Biondi has opted to conduct, the director believing in its greater dramatic and stylistic coherence.

Verdi was of the opinion that the Shakespearean tragedy was “one of the greatest creations of the human spirit” and set himself the task of rendering the fire of its drama into music during and following a period when his physical health had broken down. With its scenes of murder, battle and sleep-walking, brindisi and witches’ choruses all creating a sombre atmosphere drenched with paranoia and a lust for power, the dramatic flow of the opera places vast demands on the soloists, notably upon the unhappy title-role couple.

Fabio Biondi’s version comes with baritone Giovanni Meoni, a leading Verdi specialist as Macbeth whilst the larger-than-life role of Lady Macbeth is taken by a noted present-day Salome, Médée (and Medea), the soprano Nadja Michael. Bass Fabrizio Beggi assumes the part of Banquo, both when alive and as a ghost. Important also in the work (and as described by Stefano Russomanno in his accompanying essay) is the chorus, a leading protagonist for the composer, and here the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic Choir.

Critical also is Verdi’s orchestral writing for Macbeth, introducing rare and radical tonal colourings and Fabio Biondi, directing his Europa Galante from the violin, is just the radical, challenging musical spirit to breathe new life into Verdi’s masterpiece and its search for dramatic truth.

Fabio Biondi / Giangiacomo Pinardi PAGANINI Sonatas for Violin and Guitar

Fabio Biondi has chosen a selection of delightful virtuoso chamber music pieces by Niccolò Paganini to mark his tenth album for Glossa. Together with his long-term colleague from Europa Galante, the plucked-string specialist Giangiacomo Pinardi (here playing an original romantic guitar from c1825), Biondi delivers one of the most special Glossa albums of recent times. The works, composed between 1804 and c1828, are mainly two-movement sonatas contained in the Centone di sonate collection, although the album also includes the popular Sonata concertata in A major.

Recorded in Valencia by the engineer and producer Fabio Framba (another well-known component of Biondi’s recording setups), the booklet of this album includes a highly original essay signed by Pierre Élie Mamou, in which he looks into the Devil/God dichotomy as applied to the figure of Paganini by his own contemporaries. The graphic design for the CD takes its inspiration from this idea, for another typically Glossa look, listen and read experience… (GLOSSA)

Fabio Biondi / Europa Galante JEAN-MARIE LECLAIR Violin Concertos Op.7 - Nos. 1, 3, 4 & 5

Jean-Marie Leclair epitomized the idea of an eighteenth-century virtuoso-composer, one whose compositional output largely reflects his activity as a performer. Whilst the French school possessed precursors such as Jean-Féry Rebel, it is very much to Leclair that it owes its genuine development. The virtuoso violinist became a highly sought-after teacher, and a full generation of musicians were recipients of his teaching.

Leclair published twelve concertos for violin in two sets, Op 7 (c.1737) and Op 10 (c.1743). The Op 7 collection, of which four concertos have been included in this recording, is without doubt partially made up of works which Leclair performed at the Concert Spirituel between 1728 and 1736.

Today, we are aware of the sytle employed by Leclair in his violin playing through his own writings and concert reviews from the time. His uncompromising ideal of performance is of a truly Appolonian nature: precision and integrity in execution, economy with the use of effects, accurate intonation and nobility of expression – all features brought to this new recording by Fabio Biondi and his already legendary ensemble, Europa Galante. The scholar Louis Castelain of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles provides the booklet notes. (Glossa Music)

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi IL DIARIO DE CHIARA

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.

Along with this inspired vision-in-sound of the 18th century musical world of the Ospedale comes a half-hour long DVD dramatization; CD and DVD admirably reflect both the virtuosic skills demanded of the instrumental soloists of the day and the revolution in musical tastes (inside the Pietà as well as outside it), as the Baroque passed to Classicism via the galant style. (GLOSSA)

Fabio Biondi / Europa Galante VIVALDI I Concerti Dell'Addio

Since the early 1990s, Antonio Vivaldi and Fabio Biondi have become inseparable musical values for many music lovers around the world. In his latest recording for Glossa, the latter offers further proof of the astonishing imaginative powers of Vivaldi as a composer of violin concertos, which are matched by Biondi’s own dynamic and cultured virtuosity as a violinist (and director). With these Farewell Concertos Biondi – leading Europa Galante – turns to works written by a Vivaldi very near the end of his life as he travelled to Vienna in a desperate search for creative opportunities.

Where Biondi’s recent Il Diario di Chiara release saw a late Vivaldi surrounded by colleagues and successors at the Pietà in Venice, I concerti dell’addio sees him in a Vienna in mourning for its recentlydeceased emperor and more attuned to the nowfashionable galante style than to that of the Red Priest, however brilliant and ebullient Vivaldi’s compositional spirit continued to be. The six concertos on this disc are all drawn from a collection sold in 1741 – very cheaply it seems – to the count Vinciguerra Collalto, and today kept in Brno, and bear witness to Vivaldi’s late style (as it headed in the direction of Tartini and Locatelli).

Biondi’s selection of concertos provides him full scope to portray the vivid and masterfully-conceived imagery, the compendium of violin techniques and the opportunities for improvisation implicit in Vivaldi’s maturity. (GLOSSA)

Europa Galante / Fabio Biondi G.F. HANDEL Imeneo (Serenata "Hymen" - Dublin, 1742)

Fabio Biondi signs his fifth release on Glossa with a further opera exploration, here with Europa Galante and providing a vital interpretation of Handel’s late opera Imeneo, given in its serenade style 1742 Dublin version. 

If, by this date, the London public was tiring of the Italian opera in which Handel had been excelling for decades, and the composer was now turning both to the oratorio and in the direction of the galant style, he was still able to call upon divos and divas of the quality of La Francesina and Giovanni Battista Andreoni to perform his music. Though not a success in its Lincoln’s Inn Fields staging in London, Imeneo was performed by Handel as his only Italian work during his season in Dublin (which also saw the first performance of Messiah), complete with additional arias to add to those praised in 1740 and a pruning of the libretto (which hadn’t received approval).

The revised story turns on Tirinto (Ann Hallenberg in Biondi’s modern-day production, as performed at the Handel Festival in Halle) pining for his beloved and kidnapped Rosmene (Monica Piccinini). Her liberation by Imeneo (Magnus Staveland) leads to Rosmene being required to decide which of the two Athenians to wed. Hymen – as Handel’s work was known in Dublin – was the god of marriage, and so, will love overcome duty and reason or not? Fabio Biondi, directing from the violin, brings all his own experience in both Italian music and music from the eighteenth century in delivering a stunning vindication of an unfairly neglected Handel opera. (GLOSSA)