| Label: Glossa Catalog: GCD923401 Format: CD Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi
Giovanni Porta: Sinfonia for strings in D major
Antonio Vivaldi: Sinfonia for strings in G major, RV 149, "Il Coro delle muse" / Concerto for Violin in B flat major, RV 372, "Per la S.ra Chiara"
Nicola Porpora: Sinfonia in tre in G major
Antonio Martinelli: Concerto for Viola d'amore and strings in D major, "Per la S.ra Chiaretta" / Concerto for Violin in E major, "dedicato all S.ra Chiara"
Gaetano Latilla: Sinfonia in G major
Fulenso Perotti: Grave for Violin and Organ in G minor
Andrea Bernasconi: Sinfonia for strings in D major
* includes bonus DVD (32 min): 'Il Diario di Chiara', a film by Lucrezia Le Moli and Fabio Biondi.
Abandoned at the age of two months and taken in by the Ospedale della Pietà, Chiara (or Chiaretta) rose – within that enclosed charitable institution in Venice – to become one of the leading European violinists of the middle of the 18th century.
No stranger to such acclaim himself from two and a half centuries later, Fabio Biondi, on his first release for Glossa, has devised a programme drawing on the personal diary of this remarkable musician – taught by Antonio Vivaldi, and later a virtuoso soloist on the violin as well as the viola d’amore – of concertos and sinfonias by composers who, like the prete rosso, taught at the Pietà: Porta, Porpora, Martinelli, Latilla, Perotti and Bernasconi are all musicians whose compositions charm and delight as much today as they will have done in the time of Chiara.
Along with this inspired vision-in-sound of the 18th century musical world of the Ospedale comes a half-hour long DVD dramatization; CD and DVD admirably reflect both the virtuosic skills demanded of the instrumental soloists of the day and the revolution in musical tastes (inside the Pietà as well as outside it), as the Baroque passed to Classicism via the galant style.
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