A delightfull combination of well chosen program materials and expert recording techniques. Sabrina Frey and her companion musicians are top notch performers that serve a concert with well worked ensemble and group interplay.
I found the playing of Sabrina Frey most interesting. She commands her recorder with consumate skill. The works played (including 2 premières) are by Scarlatti, Sieber, Corelli, Valentini, Bononcini, and Marcello. Masters of the baroque form.

They consider themselves the oldest tribe of ancient Greece. Their territory is a place from the eternal Golden Age, where peaceful shepherds, unhindered by hard work, can pursue their pleasures and passions. A blissful, perfect country life: Arcadia, the ideal place for ancient mythology, for nymphs and shepherds, heroes and gods. It needn’t worry us that Arcadia was transported from its original location in the heart of the Peloponnese to Sicily in classical Latin literature.

Costituita nel 1984, l'Orchestra da Camera "Benedetto Marcello'' ha tenuto numerosi concerti in Italia a all'Estero con riconoscimenti lusinghieri da parte della critica. Interessata al recupero delta musica strumentale italiana del XVIII secolo, soprattutto inedita, ha revisionato ed inciso per I'etichetta Bongiovanni i Concerti per flauto, archi e cembalo di G.B. Sammartini, L. Leo, N. Porpora, G. Sammartini, G.B. Martini, I'Intermezzo "Traccollo" di G.B. Pergolesi e i concerti per pianoforte a orchestra di Dussek; per I'etichetta Mondo Musica.

Benedetto Marcello (1686–1739), remembered best today for some attractive instrumental music, including some virtuosic works for oboe, and his satire of the opera house, Il teatro alla moda, also wrote a small group of oratorios, including a pair of allegorical pieces for the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin at Macerata. One of these was Il pianto e il riso delle quattro stagioni from 1733. It has been described as a "highly poetic, generally mellow, faintly comic" work, in which Marcello employed "the whole arsenal of techniques he had mastered over a quarter-century"; in fact, not only is there amazing attention to detail in the string articulation, but it also provides an important record of a composer's expectations of his string orchestra. Few oratorios from this locale and period are available in modern editions, and this example has all the formal characteristics associated with the genre of oratorio in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Il pianto e il riso delle quattro stagioni dell'anno per la morte, esultazione e coronazione di Maria Assunta in Cielo, written in 1731, is the second last of the four oratorios by Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739). As a member of the Venetian aristocracy he didn‘t have to consider the musical conventions as much as his professional contemporaries. Thanks to his unconventional style he is one of the most interesting Italian baroque composers.

This album of Baroque cantatas and chamber duets grew out of a 2007 performance of Stefano Landi's 1631 opera Il Sant'Alessio starring Philippe Jaroussky and Max Emanuel Cencic (among the eight countertenors in the cast) with William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants. Christie was so impressed with the blend of Jaroussky and Cencic's voices that he brought them together to explore the vast and rarely performed repertoire of late 17th and early 18th century Italian duets for equal voices.

Ewa Podles is a rarity: a true contralto with thrilling high and low notes, not to mention everything in between. Unlike Horne, whose lower register occasionally sounds baritonal, Podles is feminine throughout her estimable range. This recording of 18th-century arias exploits every aspect of this wonderful artist, including firm, beautiful tone and awesome coloratura. All of the selections, from the familiar Purcell and Gluck to the less recognizable arias from Vivaldi, Handel, and Marcello, are sung with brio and/or firm legato. Excellent period accompaniment by Patrick Peire and the Collegium Instrumental de Bruges.

Die Blockflötistin und ECHO Klassik-Preisträgerin Dorothee Oberlinger ist mittlerweile weit über die Alte Musik- und die Klassik-Szene hinaus bekannt. Erst Ende vorigen Jahres widmete die Vogue ihr einen Artikel und in der Talkshow »3nach9« begeisterte sie die Zuschauer, auch durch ihr Duett mit Klaus Doldinger. Auf ihrer neuen CD »Flauto Veneziano« widmet sich Dorothee Oberlinger ganz der Flötenkunst Venedigs von der Renaissance bis zum Spätbarock. Die Blockflöte, im Italienischen bis zum Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts schlicht »flauto«, war in Venedig bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts ein sehr beliebtes und verbreitetes Instrument.

The 17th-century Italian art song repertory traditionally reserved for novice singers is given new life via Bartoli's artistry. With impeccable diction and evocative phrasing, she captures every innuendo of these simple, but passionate, pieces. No two repetitive phrases are alike; she chisels every line into a landscape of interpretive magnificence. Scarlatti's simple "O Cessate di Piagarmi" becomes a testament of innocent pain and plaintiveness. Giordano's "Caro Mio Ben" is transformed into a tender cry for love. All embellishments are imaginative and well executed. Accompaniment by György Fischer is equally appealing, sensitive and precise. Every singer questing for the art of singing should study these.

Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.

Modern day recognition of the music of Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739) has been totally eclipsed by the music of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). If one looks back at Marcello's popularity in the first half of the 18th century in Venetian Music, you will find that he was considered to be one of the musical glories of Italy on a par with Palestrina and Pergolesi, and was referred to as the 'Noble Venetian'. He was admired for his skillful counterpoint, his masterly attention to the words of the text he set and the noble simplicity of his melodies. All of these attributes are present in this lovely and entertaining Requiem.

Philippe Jaroussky brings his musical and dramatic powers to a programme of music from Italian oratorios of the baroque era, including five arias in world premiere recordings. La vanità del mondo, takes it's name from an oratorio by Pietro Torri and among the other composers are Händel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Hasse, Fago and Caldara. "I think composers of this period often give of their best when setting the great stories of the Old Testament," says Jaroussky. "And if oratorio stories are more static than opera, they allow for deeper reflection on the place of mankind in the universe. I think that resonates with particular intensity in 2020, a year of pandemic."

Any recording of an opera by Benedetto Marcello will, for many, bring to mind his literary satire, IL TEATRO ALLA MODA, subtitled "a safe and easy method of properly composing and producing Italian operas according to modern practice." Within its pages, no one involved in the creation of opera-librettist, composer, singers, impresario-is spared. In one passage, the composer is admonished to "oblige the impresario to provide a great number of violins, oboes, horns, etc., preferring to let him economize on double basses, for these should not be used except in the preliminary tuning."

Countertenor Andreas Scholl's new CD is devoted to little-known, late-17th- and early-18th-century cantatas whose subject matter is Arcadia, a real region in Greece, but more frequently evoked as an idyllic place filled with innocent, simple shepherds and shepherdesses. Scholl employs a more operatic tone and attitude than we're accustomed to from countertenors. Not only does he use vibrato and "lean" on the voice, but he dips down, as in the final moments of a cantata by Marcello, into a deep, dark baritone range. The effect is dramatic and apt. Elsewhere his tone is just gorgeous and always expressive, he pays attention to the text of these works and captures the theatrical moment in each. The last movement of a work by Francesco Gasparini is excitingly acrobatic.

The lament became a current and important feature of Italian Baroque monody, with its rhetorical and therefore dramatic connotations, generally set over a four-note descending bass line. The best known, though not the earliest, of these laments is probably Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, a later version of which, with a sacred Latin text, was included in the composer's Selva morale e spirituale, published in Venice in 1641. In 1607 Monteverdi had provided the music for a favola in musica performed at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, where the composer was maestro di cappella. Orfeo, with a libretto by Alessandro striggio, has a literary source in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The success of Orfeo led to the creation of a new dramatic work, a tragedy in musica, in 1608, a deliberate attempt, as the pastoral Orfeo was not, to create a work that would in some way revive ancient Greek tragedy.