Sandrine Piau (soprano)
Ann Hallenberg (mezzo-soprano)
Paul Agnew (tenor)
Guillemette Laurens (mezzo-soprano)
Modo Antiquo
Federico Maria Sardelli, conductor
A CD of world premiere recordings of music not heard since Vivaldi’s day. Volume 28 of the Foà Collection is Vivaldi’s personal collection of opera arias, and includes variants on the arias performed in the operas.
The Vivaldi Edition, a recording venture conceived by the Italian musicologist Alberto Basso and the independent label Naïve, is one of the most ambitious recording projects of the twenty-first century.
Its principal objective is to record the massive collection of Vivaldi autograph manuscripts preserved today in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, some 450 works. Incredibly, this is the private library of scores Vivaldi had at home at the time of his death in Vienna in 1741 and includes his extant operas, hundreds of concertos, sacred compositions and cantatas. Much of this music has not been heard since the 18th century.
The release of more than 100 CDs, which began in 2000, will extend over the next ten years. The Vivaldi Edition's goal is to make this extraordinary wealth of music available to the public and at the same time to reveal the full genius of Vivaldi, not only as a composer of instrumental music, for which he was already known, but as the creator of some of the 18th-century's most exhilarating vocal music.
