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La Serenissima is a British early music/period instrument ensemble founded in 1994 by violinist Adrian Chandler, who has served as the group's director since its creation. Taking its name from La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia (Italian for The Most Serene Republic of Venice), the ensemble specializes in the music of Venetian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) and his contemporaries.
Established in 1994, La Serenissima is recognised as the UK's leading exponent of the music of eighteenth century Venice and connected composers. Uniquely, the group's entire repertoire is edited from manuscript or contemporary sources, and it has been praised for its "glorious and all-too-rare ability to make one’s pulse race afresh with every new project" ( Gramophone ).
Since its first release on the AVIE label [1] in 2003, La Serenissima's recordings have been lauded by numerous publications and have attracted multiple award nominations; Vivaldi: The French Connection won the 2010 Gramophone Award for Baroque Instrumental. Their interpretation of The Four Seasons was released in 2015, reaching Number 8 in the UK Specialist Classical Chart and featured as Editor's Choice (Gramophone Magazine) and Concerto Choice (BBC Music Magazine). Their 2017 release The Italian Job has been praised on BBC Radio 3's Record Review and on Classic FM as ‘Drive Discovery’, reached the Top Ten in the UK Specialist Classical Albums Chart, and won the 2017 Gramophone Award for Baroque Instrumental in the ceremony's 40th Anniversary year. The ensemble's 2018 release Vivaldi x2 is a disc of double concertos for pairs of horns and oboes, and violin and cello. It entered the UK Classical Music Charts at No. 1 in the week of its release, and featured as Classic FM's Album of the Week.
La Serenissima has performed internationally to acclaim; recent highlights include concerts at Bridgewater Hall, Sage Gateshead and Wigmore Hall, festivals in Petworth, Sablé, Swansea and Valletta, and performances of Brescianello's opera Tisbe at the 2018 Buxton International Festival. During 2017 the ensemble curated its first residency The Grand Tour at St John's Smith Square, performing little-known works by Brescianello, Caldara and Dall’Abaco amongst others of the Italian baroque; the group gave three performances with choir and soloists at the 2017 Vivaldi in Venice Festival for Martin Randall Travel.
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi ranks amongst the greatest Baroque composers and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form into a widely accepted and followed idiom.
The Four Seasons is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives musical expression to a season of the year. These were composed around 1718–1720, when Vivaldi was the court chapel master in Mantua. They were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione.
Trevor David Pinnock is a British harpsichordist and conductor.
Hendrik "Henk" Bouman is a Dutch harpsichordist, fortepianist, conductor and composer of music written in the baroque and classical idioms of the 17th and 18th century.
Cecilia BartoliOMRI is an Italian mezzo-soprano widely known in the music of Bellini, Handel, Mozart, Rossini and Vivaldi and for lesser-known music of the Baroque and Classical periods. She has also sung soprano and alto repertory.
The Taverner Choir, Consort and Players is a British music ensemble which specialises in the performance of Early and Baroque music. The ensemble is made up of a Baroque orchestra, a vocal consort and a Choir. Performers place emphasis on a historically informed performance practice and players work with restored or replicated period instruments.
Johann Georg Pisendel was a German Baroque violinist and composer who, for many years, led the Court Orchestra in Dresden as concertmaster, then the finest instrumental ensemble in Europe. He was the leading violinist of his time, and composers such as Tomaso Albinoni, Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi all dedicated violin compositions to him.
Rondò Veneziano is an Italian chamber orchestra, specializing in Baroque music, playing original instruments, but incorporating a rock-style rhythm section of synthesizer, bass guitar and drums, led by Maestro Gian Piero Reverberi, who is also the principal composer of all of the original Rondò Veneziano pieces. The unusual addition of modern instruments, more suitable for jazz, combined with Reverberi's arrangements and original compositions, have resulted in lavish novel versions of classical works over the years. As a rule in their concert tours, the musicians, mostly women, add to the overall Baroque effect wearing Baroque-era attire and coiffures.
Alison Louise Balsom, Lady Mendes, is an English trumpet soloist, arranger, producer, and music educator. Balsom was awarded Artist of the Year at the 2013 Gramophone Awards and has won three Classic BRIT Awards and three German Echo Awards, and was a soloist at the BBC Last Night of the Proms in 2009. She was the artistic director of the 2019 Cheltenham Music Festival.
AVIE Records is a UK-based independent classical music recording company founded in 2002 by Simon Foster and Melanne Mueller who devised a unique business model based on artist ownership. Foster and Mueller continue to run the company together with executives Barry McCann and Steve Winn. The label maintains offices in the UK and US.
Rachel Podger is a British violinist and conductor specialising in the performance of Baroque music.
Boston Baroque is the oldest period instrument orchestra in North America. It was founded in 1973 by the American harpsichordist and conductor, Martin Pearlman, to present concerts of the Baroque and Classical repertoire on period instruments, drawing on the insights of the historical performance movement.
Concerto Köln is an ensemble specialising in music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dobrinka Tabakova is a Bulgarian-British composer.
Orchestra of the Swan is a British professional chamber orchestra based at Warwick Schools Foundation in Warwick. It is Resident Orchestra at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, The Courtyard Hereford, Warwick Hall and the Stratford Play House with regular concert series at Number 8 Pershore and Cheltenham Town Hall.
Erik Bosgraaf is a Dutch recorder player and musicologist.
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.
The Fondazione Academia Montis Regalis is an Italian cultural foundation promoting baroque and classical orchestral training based in the town of Mondovì since 1992. In 1994 it was recognised as a non-profit organisation Organizzazione non lucrative di utilità sociale (Onlus) by the Piedmont Region.
Arcangelo is a UK-based early music ensemble founded by Jonathan Cohen in 2010. It performs and records music from the Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic repertoire, ranging from Monteverdi to Beethoven. It is noted for its approach based on the collaborative tradition of chamber music making.
The Brook Street Band is a music ensemble playing on baroque instruments which takes its name from the London street where composer George Frideric Handel lived from 1723-1759. The Band was formed in 1996 by baroque cellist Tatty Theo to perform and record the chamber music of Handel and his contemporaries.