Beethoven’s Triple Concerto Op.56 for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra was unique in the musical literature at the time, and he knew it: he proudly wrote to his publisher that the combination of a piano trio with an orchestra was entirely new. But the innovations go beyond the combination of concertante instruments, extending as well to the importance accorded the orchestra, elevated to the status of an equal, symphonic protagonist alongside the three solo parts alone, in all possible pairings and as a threesome. This was new, and the audience was indeed perplexed when the work was first performed in Vienna in May 1804. There is no indication that the concerto was performed a second time during Beethoven’s lifetime.

The Piano Concerto in E-flat “Number Zero” (WoO 4) is a work rarely performed and therefore practically unknown to the wider public. Written by Beethoven in 1784, at the tender age of 14, it comes down to us as an unsigned 32-page manuscript with the author’s corrections: the solo piano part and the piano reduction of the orchestra parts are completely preserved, but the orchestral score itself has been lost. This manuscript was discovered in 1890 in the archives of the Artaria Foundation and was transferred to the Berlin State Library. It was published that same year. Beethoven researcher Willy Hess later restored the orchestral parts on the basis of the preserved material. The first outing of this careful, accurate work was given in 1934 by the pianist Walter Frey in Oslo (first part only), and the complete reconstruction was performed in 1968 at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

J.C.F. Fischer was likely Bohemian, and a very influential musician and composer in his day. Little is known of his career until the 1690s, when he was named capellmeister to Ludwig Wihelm of Baden, where he remained until his death at Rastatt. His largest and perhaps most significant work is the Musicalischer Parnassus of 1738, a collection of keyboard pieces organized into nine suites. In it, Fischer combines the French orchestral style with the German style. Each of the suites is named for one of the nine Muses. This recording features movements from the Urania and Euterpe suites, along with a Prelude and Chaconne from his remaining oeuvre. This repertoire is usually associated with the harpsichord and rarely performed on the organ, yet there are similarities with the “variations” style so often employed by Buxtehude and Bach in organ works.

Kerll, the Saxon son of an organist and organ maker, showed musical promise from a very early age. He travelled to Vienna to study under Valentini, then capellmeister at the Viennese Imperial Court, and he converted to Catholicism, which later led him to Rome where he likely had contact with Carissimi and Frescobaldi. He was named principal musical director to the Elector of Bavaria in 1656, and became one of the most acclaimed composers of his day. His influence on Handel and J.S. Bach is notable. His works display a mastery of the Italian concertante style and highly developed contrapuntal technique.

The three compositions on this album were all created at turning points in Dvořák’s life, when radical changes in his situation impacted his creative career. His Serenade for Strings was composed in 1875, the year the impoverished musician became a successful composer almost overnight. Each of its five movements is a variation on ternary (A–B–A) form. The resourcefulness with which Dvořák invents novel ways of returning from the middle section to the opening motive and key is astounding.

Silent Woods has much to do with Dvorak’s relocation to America. He was engaged to establish and direct a new National Conservatory in New York. Based on his now established ability to blend Czech folk music with large-scale classical forms, it was hoped he would do the same in his new post with American folk music. In 1892, before leaving his home for the US, Dvorak gave something of a farewell tour of Czech cities, writing the cello version of Silent Woods for performance on these recitals. Ten years later, Dvorak created the version for cello and orchestra recorded here. At the conclusion of his time in New York and on his return to Bohemia, Dvorak was focused particularly on writing his Cello Concerto. At first believing the cello an unsuitable instrument for concertante music, his mind changed on hearing a concerto by American composer Victor Herbert; Dvořák’s masterpiece took on definitive form in 1895.

Though Frederick II of Prussia, better known as “the Great” (1712–1786), was one of the greatest strategists of history; he found a way of reconciling his army life, his battles, and his political determination with his passion for the flute and for music in general. He played every day, even when he was at war, and in the course of his life he composed, among other things, 121 sonatas and 4 concertos for flute, annotating some of these works with the phrase ‘Frederick composed [it] amidst torments’.

In Potsdam Frederick had teachers of extraordinary skill, ranging from Johann Joachim Quantz to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and while he was certainly influenced by their style, he also proposed a style of his own that was not only closely associated with forms of ‘recitative’ influenced by vocal music, but also inspired – in certain respects – by his masonic faith. In fact, in his music one finds interesting esoteric symbolisms associated with numerology, masonic keys and the concept of the initiatory journey. Almost all the sonatas for flute and continuo are in three movements in an ascending progression of tempos: Adagio, Allegro, Presto. Of particular interest is the Sonata in C minor (King’s Catalogue No.190) in which an introductory Recitativo and an Andante cantabile lead to the closing movement, which is a Fugue (the only example of this genre of composition in all his works). Moreover, the subject of the fugue includes an evident reference to the ‘Thema Regium’, the famous theme that the King gave to Johann Sebastian Bach during their meeting in Potsdam in 1747, which formed the basis of the Musical Offering BWV1079.

This new recording presents two composers who stood at the cradle of the Golden Age of Spanish Renaissance, Bernardino de Ribera (c.1520- c.1580) and Juan Navarro (c.1530-1580). Both were connected to the Cathedral of Avila and in their musical capacity they were the teachers of several masters-to be, among them the great Tomas Luis de Victoria. During his early musical years, Victoria sang the music of Ribera and Navarro on a daily basis, and they taught him everything he needed to know about polyphony, singing, counterpoint and organ playing. This disc presents also works by de Victoria and Sebastian de Vivanco.

These are superb performances by the Spanish vocal ensemble Amystis, specialized in presenting hidden gems from the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque. Their previous recordings for Brilliant Classics with works by Cabanilles and Comes gained excellent critical acclaim in the international press. Early Music Review: ‘Amystis are worthy exponents of this glorious music, negotiating its considerable complexity with aplomb.

Attilio Malachia Ariosti (1666-1730) was born in Bologna, Italy and became a well-regarded violinist, organist, composer and librettist. He took vows at the order of the Serviti as Frate Ottavio in 1688 and was appointed organist in the church of S. Maria dei Servi in Bologna in 1693. He travelled to Mantua and Venice, the most enlightened musical and artistic centers of northern Italy and then moved to Berlin and lately to Vienna in 1703. Expelled from the Papal State for moral reasons, in 1716 he lived in London where, together with Bononcini and Handel, he became a permanent composer of the Royal Academy. At the King's Theater he played viola d'amore in the intervals between the acts, "...a new symphony composed by the famous Mr. Attilio Ariosti in which he will play a new instrument called viola d'amore".

The Six Lessons for Viola d'Amore, published in London in 1724 and dedicated to King George, are harmonically and melodically appealing and were composed expressly to teach violinists to play viola d'amore. The viola d’amore has six or seven strings and the same number of resonating "sympathetic" strings placed under the bridge, which produce its warm, ringing timbre. On the final track, soprano Elena Bertuzzi joins violist Mauro Righini and continuo players for the chamber cantata Pur alfin gentil viola.

Born in Rome in 1678 into a family of German origins, Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729) was employed as a violone and cello player by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the orchestra led by Arcangelo Corelli. Later he moved to London where he took a leading role in establishing Italian opera which was beginning to flourish, while serving as a continuo cellist in the Drury Lane theatre and the Queen’s Theatre. In 1713, Haym started to work as librettist for Handel and the collaboration continued until 1728. During this period Haym acquired the role of secretary at the Royal Academy of Music. Haym’s sonatas with flute are the first flute sonatas by an Italian composer to be published. The Sonate a Tre (Op.2) and the Sonate da camera a flauto traversa, haubois o violino solo, are strongly influenced by Corelli in the profound knowledge of counterpoint and the wide spectrum of expression of feelings and affects. From his familiarity with Corelli’s music, Haym was able to assimilate the gravity of style and nobility of expression while retaining his own musical personality.

Played by the Cappella Musicale Enrico Stuart, consisting of Chiara Strabioli (transverse flute and recorder), Romeo Ciuffa (recorder and transverse flute), Rebeca Ferri and Marco Vitale (harpsichord). Founded in 1998 the Capella Musicale Enrico Stuart specializes in 17th- and 18th- century repertoire in which wind instruments play a central role. They previously made for Brilliant Classics highly praised recordings of Boismortier and Valentini.

Renowned in his day as a virtuoso keyboard player, Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) was the most important Italian composer of keyboard music between Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti. In that capacity his output has output has been surveyed by Brilliant Classics with authoritative collections of his sonatas for harpsichord (94286) and for two organs (94347). However, Pasquini also composed more than 70 cantatas of the concise and dramatic kind written by the young Handel after he arrived in Rome in 1706. By that late stage of his life, Pasquini had held one distinguished post after another in Roman musical life and become known as one of its celebrities, as celebrated for his abilities at the harpsichord as his contemporary Corelli was on the violin. Most of his vocal music remains unpublished, which makes the pioneering efforts of Capella Tiberina in this field especially welcome.

This new recording forms a sequel to their 2013 album of two Passion Cantatas (94225) and makes a powerful case for Pasquini as Rome’s leading dramatic composer of his day. Among Pasquini’s surviving cantatas, the six scored for solo bass stand out, for their keen sense of theatre and expressive rhetoric. They take Biblical history, tales of Roman history and pastoral-erotic tropes for their subjects, and they are imaginatively presented here as a cycle, interleaved with pieces for harpsichord, as though recreating a refined evening of music-making at a Roman palazzo around the turn of the 18th century.

Capella Tiberina is led in these stylish accounts by the harpsichordist Alessandra Nigito, who has made a particular study of Pasquini’s vocal music and edited several of his cantatas for modern publication. There is no more authoritative current exponent of this music, and she is joined here by other experienced performers on Italy’s rich early-music scene.

Born in the northern port city of Trieste in 1912, the Italian composer Giulio Viozzi worked and lived in the region throughout his life before his death in Verona in 1984. He composed in a modal, melodic, diatonic language inflected by Bartok but essentially shaped by native traditions of cantabile writing whether for instruments or voices. Viozzi’s music for the theatre won success and performances throughout his lifetime, notably the opera Il sasso pagano (1964), which makes the modern neglect of his output all the more surprising: this is the only modern album available which is dedicated to his music, and it should introduce many listeners to a distinctive voice in the musical landscape of 20th-century Italy.

As he explains in his booklet introduction, Andrea Gallo was astonished when he first encountered Viozzi’s music for guitar, through the Fantasia (1964), which itself reworks two shorter earlier works, a Gavotte and Brasileira both indebted to the folk tradition. He finds a magical, surreal quality to Viozzi’s repetitions and his evocation of mood in a piece such as the Chromatic Study of 1982. While Viozzi wrote several fantasias for three guitars, his solo output for the instrument centers around the more Classical forms of the Suite variata (1978) and the Sonata (1984), also in three movements. Two works of the mid-70s, the Itinerario and Racconto, are more experimental in technique and impressionistic in mood. This album introduces the names of both Viozzi and Andrea Gallo to the ever-growing library of guitar music on Brilliant Classics. Born in 1990, Gallo studied at the conservatoire in Milan and is based there while giving recitals and appearances across Italy and farther afield.

The second half of the 19th century witnessed a proliferation of significant works for strings alone including the Serenades for Strings by Dvorák (1875) and Tchaikovsky (1880) and Grieg’s Holberg Suite (1884), followed by a trio of works for strings in 1892 from Suk, Wolf and Elgar. Tchaikovsky’s music for string instruments is notable for its range and consistency – and this culminates in the magnificent Violin Concerto and one of the greatest works ever conceived for string orchestra, his Serenade of 1880. Earlier, in 1873, Tchaikovsky wrote incidental music to Ostrovsky’s three-act drama The Snow Maiden. Though he abandoned the idea of adapting it into an opera, when Rimsky-Korsakov composed one on the same subject, he retained affection for this little-known work. Judging by the beautiful Melodrama of Act II, its neglect is unjustified. Eight years before that, as a 25-year-old student at the St Petersburg Conservatory he composed a String Quartet in B flat. If, as some authorities believe, it had four movements, only one has survived. Such is the inner power of the music that it takes on a more expressive hue when performed by a full string orchestra as on this recording.

Towards the end of 1884, the Moscow Society of Artists wished to honor veteran actor Ivan Samarin’s 50-year artistic career, and Tchaikovsky enthusiastically contributed a musical entr’acte. Tchaikovsky’s publisher Jurgenson persuaded the composer the music was worthy of publication, under the title Elegy, as Samarin died the year after the celebrations. When Tchaikovsky suddenly died near the end of 1893, the slow movement of his Third String Quartet was arranged for string orchestra by Glazunov for performance at his funeral service. Glazunov’s subtle and sympathetic arrangement of this fine music for full string orchestra honors his friend, the great composer, in truly noble fashion.

REVIEW:

This attractive program includes Tchaikovsky’s familiar Serenade for Strings along with four shorter works, the last of which, the Glazounov-arranged Andante Funebre e Doloroso from the Third Quartet, was played at Tchaikovsky’s funeral in 1893.

The chamber orchestra's playing is full and warm, rich in vibrato and expression. If you like Russian music played by native musicians (I’m thinking here of the old Leningrad Philharmonic, which became the St Petersburg Philharmonic in 1991) you’ll enjoy this. It’s some of Tchaikovsky’s most attractive music, richly played and beautifully recorded.

-- American Record Guide

Born in the context of the popular devotion of the peoples of the Mediterranean during the late Middle Ages, the spiritual lauda became well established in the central part of Italy, where a strong oral tradition is still preserved today. They were originally monodic compositions in the vernacular, based on the style of the Occitan troubadours (12th to 14th century), with a regular rhythm and simple melodic form, which could be sung by anyone with or without instrumental accompaniment.

Francisco Soto was born in Langa de Duero, in the present-day province of Soria, Spain, in 1534. He trained musically as a puer cantor in the Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma before leaving for Rome and being admitted in 1562 as a cantor in the Pontifical Musical Chapel, today commonly known as the Sistine Chapel Choir. He was the first castrato to join the choir. He served in Rome as a falsettist soprano for 49 years, until 1611, 5 years of which were spent as maestro uno inter pares of the Cappella Musicale Pontificia, between 1606 and 1611. This recording presents 20 Laudi, collected from the 5 books of Laudi, published in Rome between 1583 and 1598, written in daring polyphonic arrangements by Soto de Langa.

Suor Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) was the most prolific woman composer of the 17th century. She published no fewer than 20 collections of motets and other sacred music, nearly 200 compositions spanning virtually every genre of sacred music of her time, as well as the only complete collection of instrumental works by an Italian woman in the 1600s. This recording is a tribute to her artistry.

Born and baptized as Anna Isabella Leonardi on 6 Sept. 1620, she belonged to one of the most illustrious families of Novara. She studied at home before entering the Congregazione delle Vergini di S. Orsola at age 16. She took her vows three years later and remained in this convent until her death on February 25, 1704, at the age of 84. During her long life, Isabella served in all capacities: mater discreta et cancellaria, magistra musicae, superiora, and finally consigliera. She was clearly a woman of robust constitution and an iron will. This recording provides a portrait of Isabella Leonarda’s vast and varied output, ranging from solo motets to a large-scale Psalm setting for voices, obbligato violins and basso continuo. Numerous works exemplify her “concertato” writing in their alternation of meter, tempo and texture between florid soloistic passages and more homophonic choral treatment. The absence of male voices is solved by the transposition of lower voices or the use of instruments.

Cappella Artemisia, founded by Candace Smith in 1991, is an ensemble of women dedicated to performing the music of Italian convents of the 16th and 17th centuries. The repertoire includes both forgotten works composed by the nuns themselves, and music intended for performance in the convents by male composers, but presented as it would originally have been heard, i.e., without male voices.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) is one of the most important Italian composers of the first half of the 20th century. Famous for his sumptuous symphonic works (notably the Roman Trilogy) he had a fascination for the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, transcribing works by the old masters and using their modal techniques. The Ancient Airs and Dances “Antiche danze ed arie” and the orchestral suite “Gli Uccelli” (The Birds) are adaptations of Renaissance and Baroque dances and arias by Italian composers, brilliantly orchestrated by Respighi. Organist Rodolfo Bellatti was inspired by Respighi’s orchestrations and strove to create a similar effect on the organ, with its endless possibilities for coloring and tonal differentiations. The result is spectacular and presented on this new recording, which is recorded on the magnificent Serassi and Grisanti Organs at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Asti, Italy, the specifications of which are included in the booklet. Rodolfo Bellatti is an active recitalist and recording artist, with several albums to his credit, as well as a researcher in the areas of organ building and musicology.

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708-1763) was born in Schweidnitz, Silesia (today Poland). His special inclination towards music led him to undertake a brief period of study in Breslau (today Wroclaw) with the court musicians who were under the employment of the Archbishop of Breslau. In 1733 Janitsch moved to Berlin where the then Crown Prince, Frederick offered him a position as a double bass player. With the permission of the Crown Prince, he founded the circle "Freitagsakademien" (Friday academies), in which music was performed by professional and amateur musicians alike. From 1740, when Frederick ascended to the Prussian throne, Janitsch's position as double bass player was transferred to the newly founded Berlin Court Orchestra. The Friday academies continued in Berlin in his home in the form of weekly concerts open to the public. Janitsch's compositional style is typical of the galant and the empfindsamer Stil of the first half of the 18th century, combining attractive melodic writing with disciplined compositional craft. The Church Sonatas, written for 2 violins or violin and oboe plus basso continuo, mingle echoes of Corelli’s Baroque style with the galant or pre-Classical manner of Janitsch’s age. The Berlin Friday Academy is a Berlin-based ensemble made up of young players from around the world – a group of passionate, historically-inspired musicians striving to bring about beauty through the performance, recording, and scholarly discussion of eighteenth-century music.

Prior to the turn of the 20th century, Camille Saint-Saëns enriched the cello repertoire with two important compositions: his Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor (Op.33 ) and his Cello Sonata No.1 in C minor (Op.32). The first Cello Sonata was composed in the autumn of 1872, and its first public performance – with J. Reuschel on cello and the composer at the piano – was given on 26 March 1873 at the Salle Érard in Paris. The work is divided into three movements: the first and third have a tragic character, while the second offers an oasis of quiet serenity. The work opens with a dramatic Allegro in sonata form. The second movement stems from an organ improvisation performed by Saint-Saëns at Saint-Augustin. The final movement takes up the tumultuous and agitated character of the first and ends in an unrelenting race. Some 30 years separate the Cello Sonata No.2 in F (Op.123) from its predecessor. The fruit of laborious work, it was completed in early 1905. The Sonata is structured in four movements, the first in sonata form with contrasting heroic and lyrical characters throughout. The second movement is a Scherzo with eight variations, each with its own identity while maintaining a link to the theme, one of them in the form of a fugue. The third movement is, in Saint-Saëns’ words, ‘a romance that will delight cellists’, and he wrote of its concluding section, ‘the Adagio will bring tears to sensitive souls’. The sonata ends with a playful, light Rondo in which both piano and cello engage in technical virtuosity and imitative games.

The golden age of string orchestra repertoire must certainly be the period spanning the final decades of the 19th century to the early 20th century. The density of sound, great dynamic range, long phrases and virtuosity that are uniquely possible with this combination of instruments saw it become a particularly cherished ensemble for many of the greatest composers of the day. Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile is the composer’s own transcription of the second movement from his famous String Quartet No.1, prepared for a private concert in Paris (February 1888) with cellist Anatoly Brandukov and the Edouard Colonne Orchestra conducted by the composer. Russian composer and pianist Anton Arensky (1861–1906), who was strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky’s style, is particularly known for his Variations Op.35a on a theme by Tchaikovsky. Again, this is an own-arrangement of the second movement of Arensky’s String Quartet No.2 in A minor. Written in 1894 on the occasion of Tchaikovsky’s death, the work takes as its theme Tchaikovsky’s song ‘Legend’, adding seven variations and a coda.

Elgar’s Elegy for Strings was written in 1909 after the funeral of Robert Hadden – one of the members of the Worshipful Company of Musicians in London – at the suggestion of Elgar’s publisher Alfred Littleton and intended as a commemorative piece for future ceremonies. It was first performed in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1914, where it is still heard for commemorative celebrations today. Its popularity is justified by the poignant beauty of every single musical phrase. Most famous for his series of serenades for string orchestra, Robert Fuchs (1847–1927) is considered a worthy heir to the Viennese romantic musical tradition.

Daniel Pio Dal Barba (1715–1801) was Maestro di Cappella at Verona Cathedral, a position he took up in 1762. Before this, he taught at the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona where, on 9 January 1770, he met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was visiting the city. He enjoyed already a successful career as a composer of operas for two theatres in Verona. There are also numerous references to his work at other theatres in the Veneto and Trentino regions, where he was both a composer and male soprano. Dal Barba's music was highly appreciated for its spontaneous and popular character. He introduced a simple style into the church, far from learned academicism but above all aimed at the common people, pleasing, melodious and harmonious.

This new recording presents Dal Barba’s Requiem, a substantial and dramatic work in which the Dies Irae alone lasts 20 minutes. Also included are a Gloria and a Te Deum. These works are performed by the Coro Istituzionale Armonica, which was founded in 2018 by Alberto Turco in order to perform works by composers that have come to light in the archives of Verona Cathedral. Accompanying them, the ensemble Il Narvalo has already won critical praise for its Brilliant Classics album of music by the Spanish composer, Juan Frances de Iribarren (95859)

With a catalogue of acclaimed albums for Brilliant Classics stretching well into double figures, the Dutch recorder virtuoso Erik Bosgraaf goes back to Bach for his latest release, with an album of arrangements as imaginatively conceived and as stylishly executed as Volume 1 (94296), released in 2011, which won glowing reviews from the international music press. Bach wrote as inventively and idiomatically for the recorder throughout his career as he did for every other instrument at his disposal, but he left no concertos in which the instrument takes the spotlight.

Thus Bosgraaf and his colleagues have attempted to answer the question, what might Bach have done, or could he have done, if he had written concertos for the recorder? They have looked for inspiration to the cantatas, and not only those where Bach composed memorable recorder parts such as the Actus Tragicus. For example, the album’s opening G major concerto is compiled from a tenor aria of dazzling runs in BWV74, followed by the sorrowful opening Sinfonia of BWV12 (in which the oboe originally takes the starring role), and then another tenor aria from BWV81 which graphically illustrates the foaming waves of a stormy sea. In both aria transcriptions, Bosgraaf’s recorder takes over the vocal line, and paints vivid sound pictures with his remarkable palette of tone colors. A second concerto in D major draws its music from similar sources, followed by a Partita which the Dutch musicologist has arranged from movements of the Fifth French Suite. A further concerto is supplied by a relatively ‘straight’ transcription of the familiar (but sublime) A minor Concerto for violin, BWV1041.

Born in 1961, the Italian composer Raffaelle Bellafronte has produced a wide-ranging body of work in a modern tonal idiom. Previous albums of concertos, guitar music and chamber works paint a portrait of a lively mind and a personal voice embracing large dramatic gestures and lyric reflection, each as quintessentially ‘Italian’ in their expression as the other. The set of 12 Preludes opens with a magnificently imposing evocation of stillness, colored by the kind of bittersweet harmonies to be found in Bartok and the sense of musical space associated with Messiaen, building a surprisingly complete soundworld within the brief space of three minutes. The remaining preludes are no less ingenious in their economy of mood and gesture. Melancholy and frenzy alternate; glittering and asymmetrical rhythms stand in stark opposition to slow ostinato figurations; dense contrapuntal writing is cast against terse homophony.

Bellafronte trained as a pianist himself, and he composes for the full spectrum of the instrument’s heroic and sensual possibilities. There is a satisfying crunch to the harmonies and immediately appreciable breadth of vision to the opening paragraphs of the Sonata Prima Désaccord (2006),where contrapuntal and propulsive ostinato writing combine to pull the listener through a compelling narrative which feels longer than its 12-minute duration. From three years later, the Second Sonata experiments with a Haydnesque binary form of two quick movements – a nervous, lopsided march followed by a frustrated would-be fugue with a brutal and macabre conclusion. The Third Sonata (2014) is the most substantial piece here in both duration and ambition, launched with a momentum worthy of Bartók or Alkan. The quick-slow-quick form is superficially conventional, but it encloses a wealth of surprising excursions which challenge tonal stability and once more pitch the listener into a pianistic tumult.

As the most celebrated singer in Venice during the 1640s, Anna Renzi created roles in operas by the great dramatists of the day including Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea. As outlined by the booklet’s detailed essay on Renzi’s life and career, her career was not very long but dazzling. It centered round the many Venetian theatres and prestigious tours that took her to Florence, Genoa and Innsbruck: from 1640, when she made her debut in Rome, her home city, in an opera written by her alleged teacher Filiberto Laurenzi staged at the French embassy in Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, to 1657 in Le fortune di Rodope e Damira, set to music by Pietro Andrea Ziani, at Teatro Sant’Aponal in Venice. Roberta Invernizzi begins her recital with ‘Disprezzata regina’ L’incoronazione di Poppea and follows it with two arias from Cesti’s lesser-known Argia of 1655, hardly less dazzling in the brilliance of its vocal line. O cara libertà is a standalone aria from a collection by a composer two generations after Monteverdi, Filiberto Laurenzi (1618-after 1651), and Invernizzi ends the album on a high with three arias from his little-known drama La Finta Savia.

Between the vocal selections, Ensemble Sezione Aurea insert instrumental interludes by Venetian contemporaries such as Rossi, Cima and Frescobaldi. The album as a whole adds up to a compelling portrait of Renzi, demonstrating her particular gift for bringing characters to vivid life on stage, and also a showcase for the vocal and dramatic talents of Roberta Invernizzi, who has taken lead roles in early operas under early-music luminaries including Alan Curtis, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. The booklet also includes full sung texts and English translations.

REVIEW:

Roberta Invernizzi presents a tribute to a so-called opera diva, Venice’s most famous singer in the 1640s, Anna Renzi. With interpretations full of character, this is a successful, if somewhat brief tribute to her legendary ancestor.

-- Pizzicato (Remy Franck)