by the Melos Chorus
Second chapter of a four-part portrait. The records with which Il Giardino Armonico made its name around the world.
Lugano, 1993, Studio 1 of the Radiotelevisione della Svizzera italiana. Il Giardino Armonico records Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for the Teldec label, with Enrico Onofri as first violin and Giovanni Antonini at the helm. The record comes out in 1994 and in a single year collects the Diapason d’Or, the Choc du Monde de la Musique, the Grand Prix des Discophiles and the Premio della Fondazione Cini. Whoever listens to it today still feels what struck listeners then: dynamic contrasts pushed to the limit, tempos that change as in a scene of theatre, storms that are genuinely frightening.
In the following years the Teldec series becomes a catalogue. Vivaldi’s concertos for violin and cello, Diapason d’Or and Gramophone Award in 1996. Il prete rosso and the concertos of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione in 1997. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, with which the ensemble receives in 1998 the ECHO Klassik as orchestra of the year. And then Biber, Locke, the seventeenth-century instrumental music that few played back then.
The Vivaldi Album, 1999: Cecilia Bartoli and Il Giardino Armonico bring Vivaldi’s opera arias back to life.
In 1999 The Vivaldi Album is released by Decca: Cecilia Bartoli sings Vivaldi opera arias, almost all unknown to the wider public, with Il Giardino Armonico conducted by Antonini. The first European edition is a small bound book, and the sales surprise the record company itself. In 2000 come the Grammy, the Diapason d’Or and the ECHO Klassik. The record marks the beginning of the rediscovery of Vivaldi’s operas, which in the following twenty years have returned to the stage and the recording studio one after another. Antonini remembers it as the work that brought the ensemble international success.
With Bartoli the collaboration continues. In 2009 Sacrificium, devoted to arias written for castrati, earns the ensemble the ECHO Preis and the Gramophone Award. Later come the opera productions at the Salzburg Festival, which we will discuss in the final instalment. For Naïve, Antonini meanwhile records Ottone in villa, Vivaldi’s first opera, Diapason d’Or in 2010; for Decca, two records with the soprano Julia Lezhneva.
With Isabelle Faust, Mozart’s concertos won the Gramophone Award for Record of the Year 2017.
The recent period is marked by the encounter with the violinist Isabelle Faust. Mozart’s five violin concertos, released by harmonia mundi, win in 2017 the Gramophone Award as best concerto recording and as record of the year, as well as the Diapason d’Or de l’Année. Antonini has spoken of it as a Mozart “more intimate and closer to the Baroque”. With Faust there also came in 2023 Il virtuoso, il poeta, devoted to the concertos of Pietro Antonio Locatelli, another Diapason d’Or.
In between, records that say a lot about the conductor’s curiosity. A Telemann awarded in 2017 with the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and the ECHO Klassik. La morte della ragione, a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century instrumental music, Diapason d’Or de l’Année in 2019. What’s Next Vivaldi?, with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Vivaldi’s flute concertos, in which Antonini returns as soloist. With the Kammerorchester Basel, of which he is principal guest conductor, he has recorded for Sony Classical the complete Beethoven symphonies and, for Warner Classics, Revolution with Emmanuel Pahud.
In the next instalment we will enter Haydn2032, the longest project of his career: all of Haydn’s symphonies, with the finish line set at three hundred years since the composer’s birth.
On Sunday 15 November Giovanni Antonini conducts the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina in The Classical Rave Party, the evening that closes the Romaeuropa Festival 2026 in the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Angelica Antonini sings with him. In the morning, at 11:30 am, the 100 Cellos play. Tickets from 30 to 40 euros on TicketOne and Vivaticket.