Boris Begelman is a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. In 2013, he received a master’s degree in Baroque violin from the Palermo Conservatory, where he worked with Enrico Onofri and Riccardo Minasi. Boris Begelman has performed as concertmaster and soloist with such ensembles as Il Complesso Barocco, Accademia Bizantina, Il Pomo d’Oro, Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco, Cappella Mediterranea and Cappella Gabetta. Today he is concertmaster of Concerto Italiano. As a soloist, he has worked with Giovanni Antonini, Enrico Onofri, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Ottavio Dantone, among many others. He has also appeared as guest conductor from the violin with Baroque orchestras, collaborating with such noted soloists as Vivica Genaux, Max Emanuel Cencic, Francesca Aspromonte, Simone Kermes. In 2015 he created his ensemble Arsenale Sonoro, whose first CD, Telemann Violin Sonatas, gained success with critics worldwide. In November 2017, Sei Solo, a double album of the Sonatas and Partitas by Bach, was released. A third CD, devoted to the violin sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, will be issued shortly.
ABOUT RINALDO ALESSANDRINI
The harpsichordist, organist and pianist Rinaldo Alessandrini is one of the leading figures on the international early music scene. His predilection for the Italian repertory and his constant preoccupation with the expressive characteristics specific to the Italian style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the decisive factors that orientate his musical approach and interpretative options, both at the head of Concerto Italiano, of which he is the founder and director, and as a soloist and guest conductor. A regular guest conductor with leading orchestras in Europe and the United States, but also in Melbourne and São Paulo, he appears frequently at La Scala in Milan, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Opéra de Liège and Welsh National Opera. In the course of the Monteverdi jubilee year of 2017, he led Concerto Italiano on tour in Australia, China and Japan, and in concerts in Europe and the US. Rinaldo Alessandrini was resident conductor with the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin in the 2015/16 season. In 2016 he was appointed music director of the ‘Purtimiro’ Baroque opera festival at the Teatro Rossini in Lugo di Romagna. His discography, which has earned many awards over the past thirty years, largely coincides with that of Concerto Italiano, and features numerous Italian composers but also members of the German school. He records exclusively for naïve. In 2002, along with Concerto Italiano, he received the Premio Abbiati for his entire career up to that point. He was appointed Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2003, and is a member of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana.
ABOUT CONCERTO ITALIANO
When Concerto Italiano was formed by Rinaldo Alessandrini in 1984, the path it set out on coincided with the rebirth of early music in Italy. Since then, exploring most notably the work of the three musical patron saints it champions all over the world, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, it has transformed the approach to this early repertory and its interpretation, shedding new light on its aesthetic and rhetorical aspects. Having initiated numerous large-scale musical projects and carefully compiled a large discography over the past three decades, Concerto Italiano has become a frequent visitor to internationally renowned concert halls, opera houses and festivals, and its benchmark versions of its repertory have been received with acclaim by audiences and critics alike.
After an extended period immersed in the Monteverdi trilogy, staged in collaboration with Robert Wilson at La Scala, Milan and the Opéra de Paris, Concerto Italiano embarked on a number of major concert tours in 2016, in Australia and New Zealand, in Europe and with the RIAS Kammerchor. In 2017 it celebrated the 450th anniversary of the birth of Monteverdi with L’Orfeo on tour in China, the Vespers in Japan, L’incoronazione di Poppea at Carnegie Hall and numerous concerts in Europe. Concerto Italiano was awarded the Premio Abbiati 2002 for its work, and has also won five Gramophone Awards, two Grands Prix du Disque, three Deutsche Schallplattenpreise (L’Orfeo in 2008), the Premio Cini and five Midem Awards. The British musical press has declared its recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to be the finest currently available.
ABOUT THE VIVALDI EDITION
In 1930, after it had repeatedly changed hands over several centuries, the Italian National Library in Turin purchased a large collection of music manuscripts in the hand of the great Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. It was, in fact, a collection of his personal music scores found in his home at the time of his death. Though the event was heralded worldwide as a major cultural discovery when purchased the archive was subsequently little exploited, in great part due to a lack of knowledge of historical performance practice. It was not until the 80s and 90s that specialized musicians began to perform some of this music.
At the end of the 90s, the collection came to the attention of Alberto Basso, a highly regarded Italian musicologist and founder and director of a regional institute whose objective was the cataloguing of music archives in the Piedmont region. Working with these 18th-century scores Alberto became keenly aware of its historical and cultural importance and the need to get this extraordinary music out to the public. He approached the Parisian record label Naïve with a proposal to record the entire collection – 450 pieces of music ranging from full-scale operas to much sacred music and hundreds of instrumental concertos, and later named Susan Orlando artistic director of the recording project. “When I asked him how he had come up with the idea of recording all this music,” Susan Orlando told Opera, “he replied that the entire time he was working on the manuscripts he kept wondering how all this music could be transmitted to the public. It was quite brilliant on Basso’s part, because when you think about it a manuscript is not really alive until it is performed, while concerts are ephemeral. But by doing recordings you’re engraving this music. A fire could destroy all these manuscripts but once they’re recorded they are here to stay.” In September of 2014, production on the Vivaldi Edition came to a halt, but it resumed in 2016 after Naïve was purchased by the Believe Group, the largest distributors of digital music in Europe. The first release upon resuming the project was an opera in December 2017.
Artistic director Susan Orlando has divided the remaining repertoire into three releases a year until the project’s completion at the end of 2027, with the following year marking the 350th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Vivaldi. So far, the Vivaldi Edition has sold over 850,000 CDs and engaged more than 250 artists.
Until this project began, Vivaldi had been minimalized, music history books generally mentioning the Four Seasons and little else. However, the quality of the music alone has illuminated Vivaldi as one of the leading figures in the history of Occidental music. Vivaldi was enormously famous throughout Europe in his own lifetime and was the most important Italian composer of the 18th century. Through his prolific output of concertos, it can be proven he solidly established the 'concerto' form into a three movement fast-slow-fast structure with a defined role pitting the soloist against the rest of the ensemble, which is a form still employed by composers today. To date, more than € 3,000,000 has been invested into this recording project, documenting the work as a reference which will be invaluable to the public and to scholars alike for many decades.
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