“The solo performances are incandescente, veering between searing lyricism and precocious virtuosity. Extemporisation show why Chiara enthralled her audiences. In a short bonus DVD, Chiara’s diary is dramatised as a monologue set against musical excerpts. It’s Chiara’s and the players performances, that capture the heart”
BBC Music Magazine
June 2014
“impeccably played…one which all lovers of the italian baroque should not miss”
Early Music Review
April 2014
2015
“Europa Galante se estrena en Glossa con un extraordinario monográfico dedicado a honrar la memoria de las magníficas instrumentistas de la Pietà. Las interpretaciones (de Biondi, Ravasi, Rognoni, Marcocchi, Fantinuoli, Coelati Rama, Pinardi, Poncet) se nos antojan insuperables. Las cuerdas suenan como una sola y el continuo es absolutamente demoledor.”
Codalario
EDITOR’S NOTES
Abandoned at the age of two months and taken in by the Ospedale della Pietà, Chiara 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.
Discography
