Concerti Per La Pietra

Violinist Fabio Biondi has a singular capacity for finding something new and exciting in the music of Antonio Vivaldi whenever he considers it, a prodigious feat which he demonstrates with Concerti per La Pietà, a new collection of works calling for a variety of demanding solo challenges, superbly met by Biondi and his colleagues from Europa Galante. In his Venetian years the well-spring of Vivaldi an inventiveness was fed by the composer working with one of the leading orchestras of early eighteenth-century Europe: the one at the Ospedale della Pietà, the charitable institution which took in, cared for -and educated - girls who had been orphaned or abandoned. Within the ospedale were nurtured instrumental virtuosos - known today only by their "sporting nicknames": Bettina della viola, Margherita del arpa doppia, Lucieta della tromba, etc.