In particular, Piau is very impressive in her negotiation of Vivaldi's most ornamented passages, and Agnew's masculine timbre confounds the stereotype of the Baroque tenor as being an effete sort of fellow. Hearing Piau, Hallenberg, Agnew, and Laurens is enough to make one's jaw drop. It's true, there is no one like Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti singing today, but we are fortunate that in 2005, so many singers excel in the Baroque repertoire. Lately, we complain about the dearth of great singers. Much of the writing is florid almost to the point of sadism towards the singers, but apparently Vivaldi had many talented musicians at his disposal.

Vivaldi's creativity runs high throughout, and there's nothing dull here – as one might expect from a special collection of this sort. There are arias of revenge and arias of regret. Three of the arias – 'Zeffiretti che sussurate,' 'Usignoli che piangete,' and 'Quell'augellin che canta' – contain bird imitations in both the vocal line and in the accompaniment. 'Io son frà l'onde' is an example of the classic aria di tempesta in which the singer compares herself to a ship tossed about on the ocean during a terrifying storm. This selection of 16 arias or ensembles contains its share of familiar genres. Not exactly a 'greatest hits' collection, then, but a great and varied collection nevertheless. At any rate, Foà 28 is a treasure trove of arias for different voices and different dramatic situations. Of course these explanations are not mutually exclusive. Another is that Vivaldi simply wanted to set aside some of his most attractive and marketable material for sale, one aria at a time, to interested individuals. One is that such a collection would provide Vivaldi, then traveling extensively, with raw materials for assembling a new opera or pastiche.

But why would Vivaldi do this? Two possible explanations are proffered. How did they get there? The answer is that Vivaldi himself probably put them there. Volume 28 in Turin's so-called 'Foà Collection' contains 47 operatic arias or ensembles composed by Vivaldi between 17. At first glance, this might appear simply to be a 'greatest hits' collection from Vivaldi's operas, but the truth is a little more unusual than that.

This is another volume – Volume 27, in fact! – in Naïve/Opus 111's ongoing series of music by Vivaldi – specifically, manuscripts located in the National University Library in Turin.

Vivaldi soprano arias