Bigaglia: Cantate per soprano e continuo

Diogenio Bigaglia, was active in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century, so he was a contemporary of the much better-known Tomaso Albinoni, Alessandro, and Benedetto Marcello, and, above all, Antonio Vivaldi, whose work shows several evident– and more or less explicit – references to Bigaglia’s production. So he turns out to be a composer who is worthy of interest not only for the intrinsic musical value of his works but also for the influence his activity may have had on musicians with whom we are more familiar; this is why musicologists have recently started showing an increasing interest about him. The selection of cantatas presented within this album is performed by the voice of soprano Tullia Pedersoli that skillfully interprets the musical ‘affetti’ proposed by the simple and elegant style of the composer that in some points even seems to have provided some cues to Johann Sebastian Bach that, as known, deeply studied Italian and Venetian. All cantatas are about love and frequently resort to the literary “topoi” typical of this genre: yearning for unrequited love, intentions of revenge or suicide that are vigorously declared and never carried out, and so on.