Roberta Invernizzi has become one of the outstanding voices of Baroque music in modern times, contributing with her crystalline soprano and an unfailing dramatic sense to the rediscovery of much neglected music, from Italy in particular. Hailing from Milan, Roberta Invernizzi’s music studies initially encompassed the piano and the double bass before she took up singing under the guidance of Margaret Heyward, later specializing in both Baroque and Classical era music.
Invernizzi’s talent for characterization has been superbly demonstrated across the Gramophone Award-winning series of recordings on Glossa of Handel’s chamber cantatas in Italian with Fabio Bonizzoni, through her visceral and vivid portrayals of Arcadian characters from goddesses and nymphs to shepherdesses. Her prowess there led Fabio Bonizzoni to write recitatives with her in mind for his creation of a pasticcio opera in Gli strali d’Amore, with arias by André Campra. The flamboyant revival in recent years of music from the Neapolitan Baroque led by Antonio Florio and I Turchini owes much to Roberta Invernizzi’s contributions, whilst on the opera stage diverse roles in recent years have seen her perform in Handel’s Rinaldo and Agrippina, Vivaldi’s Ercole sul Termodonte and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea (as well as in Mozart, Grétry and Berton). Reactions from the international press have praised her singing for its “intensity and delicacy, her control of pitch and phrase production”, her “great radiance of tone” as well as frequent notes of approval for her sensitivity, refinement and subtlety.
In addition to her presence in the Handel Cantatas series (there is also a “Portrait” release, Handel in Italy) and the Campra Gli strali d’Amore, Invernizzi’s long-standing musical partnership with Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza has led to a disc of both well- and lesser-known opera arias by Antonio Vivaldi with Invernizzi cast very much in the solo spotlight. Invernizzi regularly works also with other leading conductors of the music of Vivaldi such as Rinaldo Alessandrini, Alan Curtis and Fabio Biondi, among others.
Having entranced audiences across Europe with their performances of the music which Georg Frideric Handel wrote during his time in Italy – mainly in Rome – between 1706-9, and having also delighted record buyers with the seven-volume series of “Le Cantate Italiane di Handel”, released on Glossa, Fabio Bonizzoni and his singers and musicians of La Risonanza have now gone on to impress the jury of the 2011 Gramophone Classical Music Awards. On October 6, at a ceremony held in The Dorchester hotel in London, the British magazine bestowed upon the Italian musicians a prestigious Gramophone Award in the Baroque Vocal category, for the final volume in the Handel series, Apollo e Dafne (a recording which contains two further cantatas, Agrippina condotta a morire and Cuopre talvolta il cielo as well as the title work). The singers on this disc were soprano Roberta Invernizzi and the two basses Thomas E. Bauer and Furio Zanasi. [read more...]
Fabio Bonizzoni’s attention on record to the music of Handel - which has, thus far, yielded seven discs devoted to the early Italian-texted cantatas - has just now had the good fortune to receive this year’s Stanley Sadie Handel Recording Prize for Apollo e Dafne, the final release in the present series for Glossa. This is the third time that Bonizzoni and his period-instrument ensemble La Risonanza have won this prestigious prize for their series of “Le Cantate Italiane di Handel” (previous winners were the first release, Le Cantate per il Cardinal Pamphili and the fifth, Clori, Tirsi e Fileno); three other recordings have also featured as runners-up. [read more...]