Luogo e data di registrazione		- St. Anna en Maria, Haarlem (Olanda) - ottobre 1977 (Vivaldi) - St. Stephanuskerk, Mereleke-Melsen (Olanda) - settembre 1979 (Bononcini)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Andreas Holschneider - Gerd Ploebsch / Hans-Peter Schweigmann (Vivaldi) - Onno Scholtze (Bononcini)
	Prima Edizione LP		- Archiv - 2533 385 - (1 lp) - durata 48' 47" - (p) 1978 - Analogico - (Vivaldi - parziale) - Archiv - 2533 450 - (1 lp) - durata 52' 01" - (p) 1980 - Analogico - (Bononcini - parziale)
	Edizione "Collectio" CD		Archiv - 437 082-2 - (1 cd) - durata 60' 14" - (c) 1986 - ADD
	Note		-

VIVALDI · BONONCINI: CANTATAS If Vivaldi’s Cantatas were less widely known than his concertos during the 18th century, they were at least spared the barbs of Contemporary critics. Indeed, the historian Charles Burney, who declared in 1789 that the chief merit of the Vivaldi concertos in the collection entitled La stravaganza was their “rapid execution”, softened his attitude considerably when he came to review the Cantatas. He observed: “Don Antonio Vivaldi merits a place among the candidates for fame in this species of composition... [which] are very common and quiet, notwithstanding he was so riotous in composing for violins. But he had been too long used to write for the voice, to treat it like an instrument.” Burney’s tribute to Vivaldi’s ability to write idiomatically for the voice echoes a remark made 50 years earlier by the German composer and critic Johann Mattheson, for whom “Vivaldi, although no singer himself has been able to keep violinistic leaps out of his vocal pieces so successfully that his arias have become a reproach to many practised composers of vocal music”. Only Tartini, as reported by Charles de Brosses in 1739, seems to have dissented from this commendation of Vivaldi as a composer for the voice, and he may have been motivated by simple jealousy. The Cantata was a musical-poetic genre whose social milieu was much more restricted than that of the contemporary opera. Its natural home was the conversazione or accademia of courtly or learned society. Although Vivaldi, whose sense of showmanship and entrepreneurial leanings caused him to direct his main efforts towards a wider public, remained on the fringes of these intellectually oriented circles, the opportunity to write cantatas came his way at various times during his career. At the Ospedale della Pietà, the home for foundlings in Venice where he served for many years as a violin teacher, a certain amount of secular vocal music was cultivated for the private enjoyment of the governors and their wards. But it was during the period 1718-20, when Vivaldi worked in Mantua as director of secular music (maestro di cappella da camera) to the Imperial governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, that he first (as far as we know) contributed to the genre in quantity. Thereafter, now back in Venice, Vivaldi continued to supply Cantatas to patrons or customers on demand; a collection of them surviving in Dresden evidences the spread of his reputation abroad. The poetic texts of cantatas were generally written by amateurs under the cloak of anonymity. Their literary quality was rarely high (to understate the case), and they were often produced, and subsequently set to music, at great speed. Vivaldi himself was something of a literary bricoleur, and it is possible that he was the actual author, or at least the arranger, of many of the texts he set. In the early 18th century Arcadian conventions had come to dominate the chamber cantata absolutely. Almost invariably, the dramatis personae are nymphs and shepherds, and the subject is the vicissitudes of their amours. Most of the text is in direct speech (the poet adopts the “voice” of the protagonist), but a cantata often opens or closes with scene-setting in the narrative mode. The poet “programmes” the type of setting to be adopted by the composer by writing recitatives as versi sciolti (lines consisting variously of seven and eleven syllables, mostly unrhymed), arias as rhymed verse in “shorter” metres that often have an even number of syllables. In Vivaldi’s day there was a tendency to make the structure of the cantata more concentrated than it had been in the 17th century, reducing the number of arias to a maximum of three (but two are more usual) and keeping the length of recitatives very modest. O mie porpore più belle is a product of Vivaldi’s Mantuan period. It was composed to mark the nomination as bishop of Mantua of Monsignor Antonio dei Conti Guidi di Bagno in April 1719. In the allusive language of the text, Manto, the legendary founder of the city, stands for Mantua itself. The Hrst aria uses violins to evoke the sound of hunting horns, emblematic of nobility (hence appropriate for a count), while the second uses a solo violin to convey the softness implied by the word gentile (“gentle” in the sense of well-bred). Cessate, omai cessate is an unusually complex work probably dating from the mid-1720s. Its opening movement, which expresses the impassioned nature of the text very vividly, is a catalogue of favourite devices employed in “accompanied” recitative. In the first aria Vivaldi employs, to illustrate the word lagrimar (crying), an ingenious colouristic effect also found in his aria “Sento in senso ch’in pioggia di lagrime” from the opera Il Giustino (1724), in which some instruments assigned to the same line play pizzicato, others arco. The second aria responds to the evocation of Hades and the word orrido with “horrid” gusts of notes and gloomy harmonies. Amor, hai vinto must date from no earlier than 1726, since the fourth and fifth lines of its opening recitative (“Gelido in ogni vena...”) are borrowed from an aria contained in the libretto written by Metastasio for Vinci’s Siroe, first performed in that year. In its highly contrapuntal first aria Vivaldi expresses the idea of pain through the “anguished” interval of the augmented second, which appears in long notes in the principal subject. The more hopeful mood of the text for the second aria is paralleled in the music by a switch to major tonality and a more diatonic musical language, though the contrapuntal interplay of the two violin parts ensure that a certain tension remains. ····· Giovanni Bononcini was one of the acknowledged specialists in the cantata genre during the late Baroque period - a man to rank alongside Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello. Before going on to commend Vivaldi, Mattheson praises Bononcini equally warmly for his ability to keep vocal and instrumental types of writing distinct: “Bononcini provides many lively, sparkling instrumental accompaniments for his simple vocal lines and thus often demonstrates in a single short aria, at the very first glance, this difference in styles of setting.” Some of his fellow composers, including Gasparini and Marcello, commented in similar terms. Between 1720 and 1732 the much-travelled Bononcini was based mainly in London, where as a composer of operas he briefly rivalled Handel, and it was there that he published a volume of Cantate e duetti in 1721. Both cantatas in this recording come from that collection. Unlike Vivaldi’s cantatas, which show no interest in experimenting with form, those of Bononcini are distinctly inventive. Siedi, Amarilli mia, siedi e m'ascolta begins with a miniature overture in two movements. Its opening recitative is framed by passages for violins and also employs a haunting vocal refrain, which is set, in arioso style, to the words of the opening line. In the first aria Bononcini expresses the hesitancy of a tongue-tied lover, Fileno, by fragmenting both the vocal melody and the accompaniment on violins. The second recitative gives the reply of Amarilli followed by Fileno’s confession of love. A final aria, containing the poet’s comment on the situation, uses slurs in the violins very subtly to illustrate the words laccio d'amor (snare of love). Care luci del mio bene adopts the compact tripartite scheme aria-recitative-aria that came to predominate in the late Baroque. Its opening aria, which reproaches the nymph Nice for her unresponsiveness to the speaker’s protestations of love, shows Bononcini’s great sensitivity regarding the role of instruments in the accompaniment; he is careful to withdraw the violins altogether during certain passages and to ration the amount of contrapuntal complexity they are allowed to introduce, so that the texture always remains transparent and sufficiently varied. The second aria, in which the shepherd imparts a lezione amorosa to his lady-love, calls to mind Bononcini’s great rival, for this movement possesses that robust cheerfulness that we associate above all with the works Handel wrote in England. Michael Talbot