Vivaldi: Concerti Per Fagotto VI – Sergio Azzolini

Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos form an impressive and totally unique corpus within the European instrumental landscape of the eighteenth century. With this Volume, No. 76, which again features the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini alongside his ensemble, L’Onda Armonica, the naïve label’s Vivaldi Edition brings to completion the entire recordings of the thirty-nine concertos that the Red Priest composed for bassoon. They were written between c.1725 and the end of his life, at a time during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when this instrument was still employed mainly in the basso continuo.

In this final instalment, Sergio Azzolini brings together the four complete concertos that remained unrecorded: RV 501 (subtitled La Notte), RV 478, RV 487, and RV 466. Then he adds the two that have come down to us in incomplete form: RV 468 and RV 482. Of RV 468 in C major, only the first two movements survive (Allegro molto and Andante), while only the opening Allegro molto of the latter, in D minor, remains.

The Italian bassoonist completes the album with movements in the same keys adapted from two cello concertos: RV 399 and RV 406. And to make a fitting conclusion, Azzolini offers his own version of another cello concerto, RV 402, which serves to underscore the close affinity and at times striking resemblance between these two lower-register instruments.

For this final volume of the series, the director of L’Onda Armonica calls upon a lavishly expanded orchestra, replete with oboes, flutes, chalumeaux, clarinets and even horns, in order to vary textures and atmospheres in the grand tradition of the Dresden Chapel.