Handel, Scarlatti, Corelli, Stradella, Muffat … From 1650 to the beginning of the eighteenth century, Rome exercised an immense power in attracting composers from all over Europe and experienced an intense moment of musical activity, because of – or in spite of – the papal administration. It was a prosperous period with a melting pot of influences. The programme devised here by the Roman conductor, Rinaldo Alessandrini, offers a complete and personal vision of the time, passionate and secular, lyrical (made sublime by Sandrine Piau) and orchestral, romantic in every way. Rinaldo Alessandrini is one of the leading figures in the international early music scene. His predilection for the Italian repertory and his constant preoccupation with the expressive characteristics specific to the Italian style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the decisive factors that orientate his musical approach and interpretative options, both as the head of Concerto Italiano, of which he is the founder and director, and as a soloist and guest conductor.

More than any question of instruments, strings, bows, tunings, or temperaments, the modern historical performance movement is about attitude—the desire to find in ancient music a living voice, filtered through vigorous scholarship, willing to experiment and push boundaries, and, most of all, capture the depths of emotion hidden in the score. Rinaldo Alessadrini and Concerto Italiano are some of the most successful exponents of this idiom, having recorded the complete Monteverdi madrigals on Opus 111 (highly recommended) as well as a host of other albums, from the birth of the Baroque to Bach and Vivaldi. In this album, simply titled 1600, Alessandrini has created a program that traces the rise of Italian four-part instrumental music from its earliest parting with vocal models to the rise of the string concerto, foreshadowing the development of the string quartet. In less capable hands, such an undertaking could have produced another mixed bag of early Baroque hits and misses. However, Alessandrini’s well chosen and elegantly assembled program never falters, guiding the listener with a gentle hand through the evolution of music from elaborations on Renaissance polyphonic models to the birth of the galant.