Federico Maria Sardelli (born 1963) is an Italian conductor, historicist, composer, musicologist, comic artist, and flautist. He founded the medieval ensemble Modo Antiquo in 1984. In 1987, Modo Antiquo also became a baroque orchestra, debuting with the performance of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Ballet des Saisons in front of an audience of about five thousand. [1]
He is the main conductor of the Accademia Barocca di S. Cecilia (Rome) and guest conductor of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Staatskapelle Halle, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Moscow State Chamber Orchestra, etc.
He has recorded more than forty Albums as soloist and conductor, published by the labels Naïve, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Brilliant, Tactus. A notable protagonist in the Vivaldi renaissance, he performed, recorded and edited a large number of Vivaldi compositions, often in world premiere ( Arsilda, regina di Ponto , Orlando Furioso , Tito Manlio , Motezuma , L'Atenaide , etc.). He has been nominated twice for the Grammy Award (1997 and 2000) [2] and on 28 November 2009 the Government of Tuscany awarded Sardelli with the Gonfalone d'Argento, [3] the highest medal of honour of the Regione Toscana.[ citation needed ]
He is a member of the Scientific Board of the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, for which he has published several essays and monographs, among them "Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder", Ashgate Publishing, 2007, in the translation of Michael Talbot. [4]
In July 2007 Peter Ryom appointed him as his heir to continue his monumental work of cataloging the music of Antonio Vivaldi, and since then Federico Maria has been responsible for the Ryom-Verzeichnis (RV). [5] In December 2014 he and Francisco Javier Lupiáñez Ruiz independently identified the earliest known work of Vivaldi, which he has catalogued as RV 820. [6]
In 2015 he published his first novel L'affare Vivaldi, [7] (Sellerio), a historical investigation into the disappearance of Vivaldi's manuscripts.
In addition to his musical activities, Sardelli is also a painter, engraver and satirical writer. He is married to the violist and musicologist Bettina Hoffmann. [8]
Sardelli is a longtime collaborator on the satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere and contributes through his satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch. His nonsensical style resembles that of Monty Python and Luis Buñuel, but he has a recognizable style of his own rooted in Tuscan popular humor. Sardelli, as a comic author, constructs elaborate parodies of Padre Pio or of Italian sagre (popular festivals that Italian farming communities once often organized); the so-called Proesie ("Proetries") that are ineffable nonsense works. His Le Più Belle Cartoline Del Mondo ("Most Beautiful Postcards Of The World") are elaborate stories built around 60s and 70's kitsch postcards, often representing children or couples, written in an absurdly baroque and archaic style and lexicon. A recurring character in these stories is that of the fictional dwarf Gargilli Gargiulo.
Characters and comic-strips by Sardelli include:
Clem Momigliano: an improbable detective whose character blatantly lampoons mainstream heroic characters of adventure comics. Like Mandrake he has a coloured sidekick, Negro Balongo, which he unashamedly exploits as a slave. Most of Clem's adventures begin with a classic opener mocking adventure comics and have an improbable mission issued by a mysterious "Chief", only to collapse miserably because of some trivial impediment such as the neighbour using Clem's rocket to anchor her laundry line.
Il Bibliotecario ("The Librarian"): a peculiar comic strip made always of two-frames variations on the same theme: in the first the librarian greets an unnamed elderly woman with a flowery and archaic sentence and the woman will ask for an impossibly difficult to find ancient book, such as the "Gabinetto Armonico" of Filippo Bonanni. In the second frame the librarian will reply with totally unconnected and, more often than not, heavily offensive behaviour.
Merda ("Shit"): a mute strip where various characters are nonsensically obsessed by their relationship with excrement.
Circo ("Circus"): about the adventures of a circus whose animals indulge in embarrassing activities just when the show is to start.
Il Vernacoliere is an Italian monthly satirical magazine based in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, founded in 1982 by editor-director Mario Cardinali. The periodical started to operate as a successor of the pre-existing Livornocronaca, first issued in 1961. Il Vernacoliere is characterised by its absence of advertising, its satirical style, and for the widespread use of the dialect of Livorno. It is now distributed throughout Tuscany, in many newsstands of central Italy, and in selected ones in the rest of Italy.
Motezuma, RV 723, is an opera in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi with an Italian libretto by Alvise Giusti. The libretto is very loosely based on the life of the Aztec ruler Montezuma who died in 1520. The first performance was given in the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice on 14 November 1733. The music was thought to have been lost, but was discovered in 2002 in the archive of the music library of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Its first fully staged performance in modern times took place in Düsseldorf, Germany, on 21 September 2005.
Orlando, usually known in modern times as Orlando furioso, is an opera in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi to an Italian libretto by Grazio Braccioli, based on Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. The first performance of the opera was at the Teatro San Angelo, Venice, in November 1727. It is to be distinguished from an earlier Vivaldi opera of 1714, Orlando furioso, set to much the same libretto, once thought to be a revival of a 1713 opera by Giovanni Alberto Ristori but now considered by Vivaldian musicologists to be a fully-fledged opera by Vivaldi himself.
The Ryom-Verzeichnis or Ryom Verzeichnis is a catalogue of the music of Antonio Vivaldi created by Danish musicologist Peter Ryom. Verzeichnis is the German word for catalogue. The catalogue is often used to identify Vivaldi's works by a simple number.
Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernis barbarie, RV 644, is an oratorio by Antonio Vivaldi, the only survivor of the four that he is known to have composed. Although the rest of the oratorio survives completely intact, the overture has been lost. The Latin libretto was written by Iacopo Cassetti based upon the Book of Judith.
Tito Manlio is an opera in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi, to a libretto by Matteo Noris. It was written in celebration of the marriage of Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt (1671–1736), the governor of Mantua, which he had announced at Christmas. Vivaldi quickly composed the opera within five days. Whereas the wedding eventually did not take place at all, the opera was successfully premiered at the Teatro Arciducale ‘detto il Comico’ in Mantua during the carnival season of 1719.
Arsilda, regina di Ponto is a dramma per musica by Antonio Vivaldi. The opera was first performed at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice on 27 or 28 October 1716.
Tieteberga is a partially lost dramma per musica by Antonio Vivaldi. The Italian libretto was by Antonio Maria Lucchini.
Anna Girò, also known as l'Annina del Prete Rosso, la Nina del Prete Rosso, or l'Annina della Pietà, was the stage name of Anna Maria(?) Maddalena Tessieri, an Italian mezzo-soprano/contralto of the 18th century. She is best remembered for her numerous collaborations with composer Antonio Vivaldi who wrote operatic roles for her. She is the singer who performed the greatest number of Vivaldi's operas, the one who kept them in her repertoire the longest time and who made them known across the largest geographical area.
The DeMUG Baroque Ensemble consists of twenty musicians including singers, instrumentalists and composers from the Department of Music at the University of Guanajuato in central México. The group is dedicated to the study and performance of Baroque music including the playing of period instruments and the reading of music sheets from that time. The group was founded in 2008 as a result of an interdisciplinary workshop on the performance of Baroque music given by Dr. Fabrizio Ammetto at the University.
Orlando furioso RV 819 is a three-act opera surviving in manuscript in Antonio Vivaldi's personal library, only partly related to his better known Orlando furioso of 1727. It is a recomposition of an Orlando furioso written by Giovanni Alberto Ristori which had been very successfully staged by Vivaldi and his father's impresa in 1713, and whose music survives in a few fragments retained in the score of RV 819. Therefore, Vivaldi's first cataloguer Peter Ryom did not assign the opera a RV number, but catalogued it as RV Anh. 84. The libretto was by Grazio Braccioli.
Liuwe Tamminga was a Dutch organist and harpsichordist, known for his performances of Italian Early Music.
Atenaide is a 1728 opera by Vivaldi to a revised edition of a 1709 libretto by Apostolo Zeno for Caldara.
Modo Antiquo is an Italian instrumental ensemble dedicated to the performance of Baroque, Renaissance, and Medieval music. It was founded in 1984 by Federico Maria Sardelli. Twice nominated for a Grammy award, the ensemble has an extensive discography, primarily on the Naïve, Brilliant Classics, and Tactus labels and have given the first performances in modern times of several works by Vivaldi. Modo Antiquo's larger ensemble is its Baroque orchestra led by Sardelli. It also has a smaller ensemble devoted to Medieval and Renaissance music led by Bettina Hoffmann.
Romina Basso is an Italian mezzo-soprano with an extensive discography of baroque opera recordings. She is particularly noted for her performances of Vivaldi.
La tempesta di mare, a flute concerto in F Major, is the first of Six Flute Concertos, Op. 10 by Antonio Vivaldi, published in the late 1720s. La tempesta di mare may also refer to two earlier versions of the same concerto, RV 98, a concerto da camera featuring the flute, from which Vivaldi derived the concerto grosso RV 570.
Bettina Hoffmann is a German viola da gambist and cellist, musicologist, and music pedagogue. A specialist in Renaissance, and Medieval music, she is the leader of the Renaissance and Medieval ensemble of Modo Antiquo. She has an extensive discography, primarily on the Brilliant Classics and Tactus labels and participated in two Grammy-nominated recordings.
Ottaviano Tenerani is an Italian keyboard player, conductor, musicologist. He is the leader of Il Rossignolo, an ensemble on period instruments that he founded in 1998 together with the flautist Marica Testi and the recorder and oboe player Martino Noferi.
Lodovico Fuga (1643-1722) was an Italian Baroque composer and organist, mainly active in Venice, where he was a cantor at St Mark's Basilica. In 1680 he succeeded Gasparo Sartorio as organist at San Rocco, Venice, a post he held until his death and where he gained a pay rise to 36 ducats a year in 1692. Oral tradition says that in 1682 Antonio Lotti became one of his pupils, although there is no documentary evidence. He may also have played a part in training Antonio Vivaldi.
