Concerto Italiano

Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Giovanni Legrenzi: Mottetti (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:13:13 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve

Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano dedicate their new album to the motets of Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), a very influential composer of the seicento, and a reference even after his time in Italy. The name Giovanni Legrenzi, almost contemporary with Carissimi and Lully, is largely unknown today. And yet his reputation during and after his time, far exceeded the walls of Saint Mark’s in Venice, where he officiated from 1685 until his death: his numerous pupils included Lotti, Caldara and Vivaldi, his themes were borrowed by Bach and Handel, and he composed in all musical genres, instrumental and vocal, sacred and profane.
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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Bach: Ouvertures for Orchestra (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 02:10:12 minutes | 2,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

Facce d’amore, ‘Faces of love’ follows Jakub Józef Orliński’s first solo album, Anima Sacra, which moved Gramophone magazine to announce that “This is a voice with a big future.” It brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained countertenor says, the programme – which includes eight world premiere recordings – comprises “operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also anger or even madness.” Spanning some 85 years of the baroque period, the arias on Facce d’amore are by Handel, Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini, Conti, Hasse, Orlandini, Predieri and Matteis. Orliński is again partnered by the instrumentalists of Il Pomo d’Oro and their Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev.

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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – 1700 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:05:01 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

A player of the harpsichord, organ and pianoforte; a choirmaster and conductor; Rinaldo Alessandrini is a teacher too, who loves to use his records and concerts to draw his audience into thrilling themes. This Roman is well-placed to know just how much history – and musical history is no exception here – is made up of strata which build up over each other, creating a jumble which can be anarchic, but which always drives invention.

After an album that retells the story of 150 Years of Italian Music (Naïve 1994), and then another dedicated to the beginnings of Italian baroque in 1600 (Naïve 2012), we were treated to an enchanting black pearl, as incongruous as it was strange: Monteverdi – Night. Stories of lovers and Warriors (Naïve 2017) offers a collection of works that celebrate the night. Here is a recording dedicated to the flourishing of instrumental music in the later baroque period around 1700.

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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Monteverdi: Daylight. Stories of Songs, Dances and Loves (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:01:45 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve

This new recording is like an insert between the books of madrigals that mark the course of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s discography, in his long-term progress towards a complete recorded edition.

Daylight is a continuation of Night, which appeared on the occasion of the 350th Anniversary of the composer’s birth. Not only do we have the same thematic, non- chronological concept – a sort of ‘Best Of’ Monteverdi’s nine books of madrigals and opera arias, augmented by instrumental pieces by Falconieri and Marini – but it also has its own discrete dramaturgy, from dawn to the full sunlight of day, a scenario conceived by the Italian conductor and harpsichordist.

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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Bach: Variations on Variations (Arr. for Baroque Ensemble) (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:08:15 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

In this programme entitled Variations on Variations, Rinaldo Alessandrini, one of the today’s references on Baroque music, has chosen to adapt the Goldberg Variations and the Aria variata alla maniera italiana – initially composed for the keyboard – for small string ensemble, from duo to quartet. An intellectual and affectionate re-reading of some of the titans in music, Alessandrini’s ‘variations’ echo a common practice found in Bach himself (and many composers thereafter): we see in the Mass in B Minor, for example, numerous elaborations of earlier works; several movements of the Brandenburg Concertos have been taken in various ways in other cantatas; while his German version of Psalm 51 is adapted from the score of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The passionate work of Rinaldo Alessandrini, who has sought to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of the original work and to the practice of writing instrumental music during this period, results in a breathtaking new light shone upon the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.

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Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini – Vivaldi: Concerti per archi II (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 51:14 minutes | 569 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

The concertos for strings are a very special genre in Vivaldi’s output. Contrary to the concertos for solo instruments, those offer a real balance and amazing range of colours between all the intruments concerned. Following a very successful first volume, released in 2004, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano offer a new milestone recording in Vivaldi’s instrumental music, full of colours and refinement.

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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Vivaldi 12 Concertos Op.3 ‘Estro Armonico’, Bach Keyboards Arrangements (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 02:38:02 minutes | 2,83 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve

By its title and its twelve violin concertos, Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico immediately captures the imagination. Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano, with the addition of high-calibre keyboardists, present the full collection with the six additional adaptations for keyboard by Bach.
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Rinaldo Alessandrini, Concerto Italiano – Monteverdi: Concerto. Settimo libro de’ madrigali (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 02:12:22 minutes | 2,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve

With this recording of Book VII of Claudio Monteverdi’s Madrigals (1619, Venice), Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano devote themselves to a love theme with a very pastoral edge the composer particularly savoured.

The Italian harpsichordist and conductor once again offers us a collection of Monteverdi madrigals of the highest quality, in which the poems not only lead the singing, but also determine the arrangement of the madrigals by poet. Inspired by “the hitherto unpublished stamp of a literary intention” indicated by the composer at the start of the collection, Rinaldo Alessandrini and his ensemble, accustomed to enlightening dramatics, offer a sparkling polyphony varying from one to six voices, in a wide range of pitches.

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Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini – Un viaggio a Roma (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:12 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

Handel, Scarlatti, Corelli, Stradella, Muffat … From 1650 to the beginning of the eighteenth century, Rome exercised an immense power in attracting composers from all over Europe and experienced an intense moment of musical activity, because of – or in spite of – the papal administration. It was a prosperous period with a melting pot of influences. The programme devised here by the Roman conductor, Rinaldo Alessandrini, offers a complete and personal vision of the time, passionate and secular, lyrical (made sublime by Sandrine Piau) and orchestral, romantic in every way. Rinaldo Alessandrini is one of the leading figures in the international early music scene. His predilection for the Italian repertory and his constant preoccupation with the expressive characteristics specific to the Italian style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the decisive factors that orientate his musical approach and interpretative options, both as the head of Concerto Italiano, of which he is the founder and director, and as a soloist and guest conductor.

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Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini – 1600 (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:58 minutes | 545 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique

More than any question of instruments, strings, bows, tunings, or temperaments, the modern historical performance movement is about attitude—the desire to find in ancient music a living voice, filtered through vigorous scholarship, willing to experiment and push boundaries, and, most of all, capture the depths of emotion hidden in the score. Rinaldo Alessadrini and Concerto Italiano are some of the most successful exponents of this idiom, having recorded the complete Monteverdi madrigals on Opus 111 (highly recommended) as well as a host of other albums, from the birth of the Baroque to Bach and Vivaldi. In this album, simply titled 1600, Alessandrini has created a program that traces the rise of Italian four-part instrumental music from its earliest parting with vocal models to the rise of the string concerto, foreshadowing the development of the string quartet. In less capable hands, such an undertaking could have produced another mixed bag of early Baroque hits and misses. However, Alessandrini’s well chosen and elegantly assembled program never falters, guiding the listener with a gentle hand through the evolution of music from elaborations on Renaissance polyphonic models to the birth of the galant.

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