Vivaldi - Sonate da Camera a tre, opus 1

Naïve’s valiant project to record Vivaldi’s complete personal library of scores (some four hundred fifty autograph manuscripts preserved in Turin) has surpassed forty CDs and counting, but the label has already begun appendices to the project, including new discoveries and, as here, important pieces not included in the main collection. This is a wonderful thing, as it gives us nine of the Red Priest’s Op. 1 trio sonatas in intense, color-rich performances by the period-instrument ensemble L’Estravagante. One vital development of the latter-day period-instrument movement has been the reclaiming of Italian Baroque repertoire by Italian groups (back from Northern Europeans who got there first, if not best). Like their finest native counterparts, L’Estravagante speaks this music as a mother tongue – and the sound is vivacious, dramatic, gorgeous. Vivaldi’s chamber settings for two violins with cello or harpsichord (and sometimes theorbo or chamber organ) are as fresh as sunshine here, starting with the composer’s eleven-minute set of variations on the compulsive “La Folia” rhythmic-melodic theme so pervasive in the Baroque era. This isn’t demure, rarified chamber art; it’s music as sensual rapture.

– Bradley Bambarger, Listen Magazine [Summer, 2012]

In 1705, Giuseppe Sala published in Venice the Suonote do camera a tre, due violini o violone o cembalo op.1 of Antonio Vivaldi. This set of trio sonatas marked the official 'debut' of a composer who was already more than a mere youth (the 'Prete Rosso' was then 27-years old), and probably contains the earliest works of his that have come down to us. It is very likely, though, as Michael Talbot has pointed out, that the copy of 1705 is in fact a reprint of a now lost first edition published in 1703. However that may be, this collection dedicated to the Brescian nobleman Count Annibale Gambara displays a balance - at times, inevitably, somewhat precarious - between reference to codified formulas and models, on the one hand, and the definition of an original expressive voice on the other. In terms of scoring, his Op.1 adopts the recently created Italian format of the trio sonata, the output of which was dominated by the Arcadian reform of Arcangelo Corelli: even in Venice, where a renowned instrumental tradition already existed, Corelli's Opp.1-4 enjoyed almost immediate diffusion and were reprinted by the aforementioned Sala just a few years after the Roman first editions (in 1684, 1686, 1691 and 1695 respectively).


The Vivaldi Edition, a recording venture conceived by the Italian musicologist Alberto Basso and the independent label Naïve, is one of the most ambitious recording projects of the twenty-first century.
Its principal objective is to record the massive collection of Vivaldi autograph manuscripts preserved today in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, some 450 works. Incredibly, this is the private library of scores Vivaldi had at home at the time of his death in Vienna in 1741 and includes his extant operas, hundreds of concertos, sacred compositions and cantatas. Much of this music has not been heard since the 18th century.
Follows a list of the works available at the moment: