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)