This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way ...
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This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way devoted to making Vivaldi out as a rebel in his time. A virtue of this collection is that the listener gets the chance to sample some of Naïve's opera recordings, a major financial commitment that listeners may not be ready to make in the case of a little-known work like Tito Manlio. Sinfonias and other instrumental passages logically join with the opera arias in one direction; there are also good selections from some big but obscure Vivaldi concertos, like the "Grosso Mogul" violin...
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