The towering presence of
Vivaldi
's music in the Italian High Baroque has tended to almost completely obscure his contemporaries, several of whom found employment at foreign courts just as
did at the end of his life. The title
Forza Azzurri!
("
Go Blue!
"), the slogan of Italian soccer fans, is here deployed to suggest the pervasiveness of the Italian sound in the middle of the 17th century. The Venetian music specialist group
La Serenissima
and director
Adrian Chandler
set out to explore that sound with this collection of concertos and string pieces by
and others. There are three concertos by
, and they do show that he was head and shoulders above his competition in these late works that experimented with existing Baroque forms at every turn. They benefit from fine work by the soloists, especially
Tabea Debus
; hear her crisp work in the finale of the
Concerto for sopranino recorder, strings, and continuo, RV 433
.
Debus
is also heard in the
Concerto for recorder, strings, and continuo
of
Giuseppe Sammartini
(1695-1750), older brother of
Giovanni Battista Sammartini
, and this work approaches
's ability to write idiomatically for soloists. There are also non-soloist works from
Lorenzo Gaetano Zavateri
,
Evaristo Felice dall'Abaco
, and
Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello
, not a one of whom is well represented on recordings, and the performances are vigorous and sharp. The music here is nowhere less than well-wrought, and Baroque music lovers will greet this release with great interest; enough did so to put this album on best-seller lists in late 2022. The Cedars Hall at the Wells Cathedral School makes an idiomatic venue for the music. ~ James Manheim