Sergio Azzolini

As you would expect after the successful volumes 1 and 2, this is a very exciting recording, featuring the virtuosity and poetry of Sergio Azzolini.

This 48th release in the Vivaldi Edition features a selection of the finest works for bassoon ever composed. Azzolini is like a magician with his instrument and with each CD Azzolini proves himself to be an artist of endless imagination and virtuosity and surpasses the one before. In the catalogue of Vivaldi’s works, the bassoon is in fact the instrument assigned the largest number of solo concertos after those written for the violin, the composer’s own instrument.There are 39 concertos for bassoon in the National Library of Turin, which means we are only just half way on this wonderful journey!

Recorded in the Church of Our Lady, Queen of Angels in Prague, July 2012 (CD1), June 2003 and September 2005 (CD2).

Whereas Vivaldi needs no introduction whatsoever and other names (Caldara, Fasch, Tůma) are familiar to lovers of Baroque music, even specialists have only been getting to know the remarkable oeuvres of Reichenauer and Jiránek over the past few years, owing in large part to Supraphon’s Music From Eighteenth-Century Prague series.

Prague is that which all these composers had in common; for some of them the city represented a significant part of their career, for others a short episode or merely a way station. The Czech capital was a melting pot in which Dresden, Vienna, Naples and Venice came together and the influences of all the major European musical centres were recast. In aristocrats’ exquisite palaces, and to the delight of their masters, these superlative artists performed their own chamber music, whose originality and splendour we can rediscover today. The CD blends the refinement and spontaneous musicality of the renowned Collegium Marianum with the Italian vivacity of their special guest, the phenomenal bassoonist Sergio Azzolini.

The splendour and refinement of the music that resounded in Prague Baroque palaces.

This is the second volume of Bassoon concertos to be released by Naïve as part of the prestigious “Vivaldi Edition”. As with the first, the recording features the outstanding combination of the soloist Sergio Azzolini, an acknowledged expert in baroque performance, and the critically acclaimed period instrument group L’Aura Soave.

Internationally renowned bassoonist Sergio Azzolini was born in 1967 in Bolzano, Italy. As a baroque bassoon player he is a member of the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges, and appears regularly as soloist with L’Aura Soave Cremona, Sonatori della Gioiosa Marca and La Stravaganza Köln. He is also a member of the ensemble Parnassi Musici.

The group L’Aura Soave was formed in 1995 by lutenist and musicologist Diego Cantalupi with the aim of exploring Italian vocal and instrumental traditions and little-known Italian composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the noted soloists with whom it appears are Emma Kirkby, Barbara Hendricks, Sophie Daneman, and Nuria Rial.

In the last few years L’Aura Soave has begun a close collaboration with the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, whose role as both soloist and director has greatly influenced the orchestra. Its first recording of bassoon concertos by Vivaldi (OP30496) for the Naïve Vivaldi Edition was awarded the prestigious Diapason d’Or in France as best instrumental release of 2010.

As part of the successful Vivaldi Edition, Naïve’s ‘Concerti per fagotto’ is one of the rarely recorded versions of Vivaldi’s Concertos for bassoon and the first dedicated to this period instrument within this collection.

This recording features a selection of the finest works for bassoon composed in the baroque music period. Vivaldi is the most significant composer ever of bassoon concertos with his own oeuvre including 39 concertos for the instrument.

Sergio Azzolini is a multi-prize winner at many international events. He is acclaimed for his recordings with major European orchestras and is a successful soloist with leading early music ensembles all over Europe. Azzolini is particularly familiar with Vivaldi’s works. As a conductor, he mounted two unpublished Venetian operas including Vivaldi’s La fida ninfa and worked on two other releases within the Vivaldi Edition. ‘Concerti per fagotto’ is a rigorous new edition of Vivaldi’s work which is careful to preserve all the details found in the original manuscripts from the Venetian composer.

These are splendid musical delicacies by the “French Mozart” Devienne.

They are also works requiring high virtuosity from the performers.

Outstanding soloists are joined by Villa Musica, skilled chameleons of chamber music.

A new discovery from the treasureseeker Orchestra Capriccio!

Johann Wilhelm Hertel combines festive splendour, sensitive style and dancing flair in a very personal style.

Graupner is best known as a composer of cantatas but this CD highlights his compositions in other genres. Ensemble il capriccio plays on replicas of historical instruments and here presents four bassoon concertos, a double concerto for bassoon and chalumeau, as well as Graupner’s only violin concerto in what are mostly world premeiere recordings.

New recordings from Supraphon’s Gramophone Editor’s Choice winning series “Music From 18th Century Prague”

Unlike the copiously preserved sacred music, instrumental works by Czech composers in the Prague of the first third of the 18th century are as scarce as hen’s teeth. The twenty or so instrumental pieces by Antonín Reichenauer are among the most significant.

Reichenauer was a musician in Count Morzin’s chapel, in which he assumed the role of in-house composer after Johann Friedrich Fasch. The ensemble’s superb quality is documented by the Count’s regular contacts with Antonio Vivaldi, whom he engaged as his “maestro di musica in Italia”. Among other pieces, Vivaldi dedicated to Morzin his Opus 8, containing the celebrated The Four Seasons. The rarity of Reichenauer’s virtuoso concertos is emphasised by their being extremely challenging in technical terms, which serves as evidence of the skills of the chapel’s members – even Vivaldi himself lauded them!

Many a contemporary musician would find these concertos extremely difficult. This, however, is certainly not the case of the “wizard” Sergio Azzolini and the other soloists featured on this recording. Together with Collegium 1704, an ensemble that gained renown with albums of Jan Dismas Zelenka’s paramount compositions, they perform Reichenauer’s concertos with a vivacity and energy this music requires.

‘The music of Picasso’ takes us on a wonderful journey illustrating the influence of music upon Picasso’s life and career.

From Flamenco to Satie, from Stravinsky to Granados, the music of Picasso are those he liked to hear and sing, those for which he conceived sets and texts, and finally those which directly evoke an aspect of his imaginative universe. They are gathered in this set, to give a new light on the work of this immense artist.