France's Naïve label has made its mark with stirringly played recordings of Baroque music by top groups from all over Europe, presented in packaging with striking contemporary design elements that emphasize the music's energy and relevance. The label has done well enough that it has been able to amplify its own catalog with reissues of ...
Domenico Scarlatti's Stabat Mater for 10 voices is a curious mix of throwback and one-of-a-kind creation entirely unlike anything else in his output. It has none of the proto-Classical language of his keyboard sonatas and seems to have been written as some kind of demonstration of the continuing relevance of the old polyphonic choral styles. And ...
If speed was the sine quo non of historically informed period instrument performance practice, this disc coupling Vivaldi's Gloria and Magnificat along with a pair of concerti performed by the Concerto Italiano under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini would be hands down the best historically informed period-instrument performance practice ...
Austerely agonized, excruciatingly ecstatic, and vocally virtuosic, this disc joining Alessandro Scarlatti's Dixit Dominus and Magnificat with five secular madrigals incarnates the notion of mannerism in music. Though self-consciously conservative, Scarlatti's music here is so expertly composed and so manifestly deeply felt that its extraordinary ...
The style of Italian early music conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano might be described as both strongly expressive and highly intelligent. Consider this recording of Monteverdi's Sixth Book of Madrigals, pieces that hover between the older polyphonic madrigal tradition and the newer, essentially soloistic and dramatic ...
The recordings of the Concerto Italiano under its leader Rinaldo Alessandrini, such as this album, first released in 1997, electrified the authentic-performance movement in Italy. Alessandrini showed that performances of Vivaldi on authentic instruments could be edgy, brisk, even tough. The group's ensemble work was unmatched, but perhaps best of ...
The career of conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini is a testimony to his rigor as a scholar and his flexibility and sensitivity as a musician. A case in point is his treatment of Monteverdi, a composer whose music underwent seismic developments between his early career as a Renaissance madrigalist and his Venetian operas written in the mid-seventeenth ...
L'Orfeo has become enough of a standard that it's no longer treated as a museum piece requiring reverential sobriety in its presentation, but even by modern standards, Naïve's recording must qualify as one of most uninhibited and vivacious on disc. This quality is not merely a matter of tempo, even though this version is overall somewhat faster ...
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