With its dis­tinct­ive sound and di­verse rep­er­toire, Il Giardino Ar­monico is one of today’s most not­able Baroque en­sembles. Col­our­ful, in­di­vidu­al­ist­ic and styl­ish, it was foun­ded by Luca Pi­anca (lute and the­orbo) and Gio­vanni Ant­onini (flute) in 1985 and has re­mained es­sen­tially Itali­an in char­ac­ter, though its mem­bers, all spe­cial­ists in play­ing peri­od in­stru­ments, in­clude gradu­ates from lead­ing mu­sic col­leges around Europe. Reg­u­lar ap­pear­ances and tours in Europe, Amer­ica and Ja­pan have won them an en­thu­si­ast­ic in­ter­na­tion­al fol­low­ing and their re­cord­ings have garnered nu­mer­ous awards.

The group’s mu­sic­al fo­cus is the Itali­an rep­er­toire of the 17^th and 18^th cen­tur­ies and, de­pend­ing on the de­mands of in­di­vidu­al pro­grammes, it brings to­geth­er between three and twenty-six mu­si­cians.

In this film, Il Giardino Ar­monico fea­tures Pi­anca and Ant­onini, En­rico Ono­fri and Marco Bi­an­chi (vi­ol­in), Paolo Bes­chi (cello) and Luca Guglielmi (harp­si­chord). They play pieces by Cas­tello, Spadi, Mar­ini, Mer­ula and Viv­aldi.

Re­cor­ded spe­cially for tele­vi­sion in Si­cily, in a vari­ety of evoc­at­ive loc­a­tions around Palermo, strik­ingly set and lit for the en­semble’s per­form­ances, this film re­flects Il Giardino Ar­monico’s dy­nam­ic ap­proach to mu­sic-mak­ing in its use of video tech­niques: Baroque mu­sic for a 21^th cen­tury audi­ence.
Get your baroque funk done! It’s avail­able on DVD.