As the composer, conductor, scholar and provocateur explains in his own notes, this is Baroque music for our time. Federico Maria Sardelli's long experience researching and editing the music of Vivaldi leaves him perhaps ideally placed to recreate such music in his own image, which he does here with chamber, orchestral and vocal music that is less a pastiche, in which identity is obscured, than a defiant recreation of a past age. ‘It’s important for me to point out that I don’t compose “neo-Baroque” music, but Baroque music. It’s not a question of revisiting a musical idiom, or being influenced by it. What I do is breathe new life into a style that’s dead so that it regains its own original language and adheres to its own original criteria, expressing vibrant new ideas that are keeping with its identity.’
As his fellow composer Carlo Boccadoro remarks, the result ‘is rather like filling antique containers with sparkling coloured liquids so that they take on an entirely new aspect; or looking at certain Renaissance portrayals that seem slightly distorted until they are viewed from exactly the right angle… Like optical illusions themselves, his music is both real and immaterial, built from solid counterpoint and born aloft by airy lightness. Sardelli subtly eludes the whole subject of musical idiom so central to all forms of contemporary music, fully aware of his own unique and inimitable individuality.’
The performers on this unique disc are experienced performers of the Baroque style, playing in 'historically informed' conditions – a further paradox that enriches this time-bending recording. Under the baton of Sardelli, Modo Antiquo appears regularly at major international festivals and concert halls. Its discography of more that 40 titles includes many world premiere recordings.
Other information:
- New recording made in 2013.
- Another obscure baroque composer dug up from the dusty archives of some Italian library? No! Federico Maria Sardelli is alive and kicking, a highly respected musician and conductor rightly famed for his numerous outstanding recordings (the Vivaldi Edition on Naïve).
Sardelli is also a composer of Baroque music, and to comment on that we better let him speak himself: “It’s important for me to point out that I don’t compose ‘neo‐Baroque’ music, but Baroque music. It’s not a question of revisiting a musical idiom, or being influenced by it. What I do is breathe new life into a style that’s dead so that it regains its own original language and adheres to its own original criteria, expressing vibrant new ideas that are keeping with its identity.”
- Sardelli’s Baroque music is sparkling, luminous, witty, deeply feeling, and extremely well crafted: a true “discovery”!
- Performed by his own Modo Antiquo, and a line-up of excellent soloists of international renown. And of course conducted by himself..
- Booklet notes including tributes to Sardelli from the Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot.
