Under the artistic direction of Matthias Maute, Ensemble Caprice is renowned for its innovative interpretations of baroque music. Their previous CDs Vivaldi & Baroque Gypsies (AN 29912) and Telemann & Baroque Gypsies (AN 29919) have been extremely successful. Here they turn their attention to the fiery and passionate music of South America, music with a unique character.

The delightfully unusual disc Alla turca takes its initial inspiration from the failed 1683 siege of Vienna by the Turks and never looks back. The music explored here belongs to the Holy Roman Empire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an empire that celebrated both the arms that held back the Islamist hordes, and the more gentle arts of music that several Emperors personally studied. Alla turca brings a seldom-heard Baroque repertory to life in vivid musical color.

The four works presented here were written for the Ospedale della Pietà, the female orphanage where Vivaldi taught voice and violin. Although the scores for the two choral works on this recording, the Gloria and the Magnificat, are written for the traditional four voices from soprano to bass, we must wonder who could have supplied the tenor and bass voices for concerts given by the orphans. Boys were not admitted to the orphanage, and there were very few men among its staff. In his notes for this recording, conductor Matthias Maute states that the tenor and bass parts were sung by the girls of the Ospedale. Michael Talbot, who has written extensively on Vivaldi’s life and sacred music, agrees with this assertion. According to Talbot, the tenor line would have been sung at the written pitch, while the bass line would have been sung an octave higher.

Following Ensemble Caprice’s first recording of Vivaldi’s sacred music (Gloria! Vivaldi and his Angels) we return to Vivaldi’s Venice and find ourselves yet again within the confines of the Ospedale della Pietà orphanage where, beginning in 1703, Vivaldi, the Red Priest, not only taught the orphan girls violin and singing, but also composed many of his most dazzling concertos as well as a substantial part of his highly inspired corpus of sacred music.

Ensemble Caprice under the direction of Matthias Maute presents Joseph de Boismortier's baroque opera-ballet Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, featuring singers Arthur Tanguay-Labrosse (Don Quixotte), Dominique Cote (Sancho Panza), Catherine St-Arnaud (Altisidora) and Geoffroy Salvas (Merlin and Montesinos).

As mentioned in his autobiographies, Telemann's encounters with Eastern European gypsy music influenced his own compositions. The young composer must have been enthralled by the wonderful inventiveness of this music, as typified in this recording with the last movements of the Caprice Symphony and the Concerto in e minor for recorder and flute.