Is it possible to speak of a Canadian style in Baroque music? Groups like Toronto's Aradia Ensemble offer an alternative to the fiery performances of the Italians, the smoothness of the northern Europeans, or the bigger-is-better traditional performances the world over. And they put bodies in the seats in Toronto and Montreal. Consider the quartet of soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists in this disc of Vivaldi pieces with choruses and arias. To listeners hooked on the Italians, soprano Carla Huhtanen's take on the first ...
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Is it possible to speak of a Canadian style in Baroque music? Groups like Toronto's Aradia Ensemble offer an alternative to the fiery performances of the Italians, the smoothness of the northern Europeans, or the bigger-is-better traditional performances the world over. And they put bodies in the seats in Toronto and Montreal. Consider the quartet of soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists in this disc of Vivaldi pieces with choruses and arias. To listeners hooked on the Italians, soprano Carla Huhtanen's take on the first movement of the motet In furore iustissimae irae, where Vivaldi's sacred style approaches purely operatic dimensions, may seem underpowered. Yet the aria is beautifully shaped. That motet may have been written for a Roman castrato, which would partly explain its thick vocal difficulties, but some of the other pieces were written for Vivaldi's chorus at the Ospedale della Pietà, the home for illegitimate girls where he worked as maestro di cappella for much of his life. The arias in...
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