La Risonanza

The ensemble La Risonanza, which has been active in both vocal and instrumental music, has emerged as one of the leading lights in the vigorous historical-performance movement in Italy. La Risonanza was founded in 1995 by harpsichordist, organist, and conductor Fabio Bonizzoni, a graduate of the Hague Conservatory and a student of Ton Koopman there. The group has appeared in most of Italy's important concert series, has toured abroad, and has been featured at major early music festivals in Utrecht, Bruges, Cuenca, Versailles, and Saint Michel en Thiérache. La Risonanza has a core of about 15 instrumentalists but has a flexible membership that shifts according to the music being performed, and may expand to include collaboration with choral singers in larger works. Much of La Risonanza's international visibility has come from its ambitious and well-received catalog of recordings, most of which have appeared on Spain's Glossa label. Handel's Italian music has been at the center of the group's output, and in 2007 they launched a complete cycle of Handel's Italian-language cantatas, with album groupings determined by the cantatas' intended recipient or event. The debut album in that series in 2007 won the Stanley Sadie Handel Recording Prize, and subsequent releases have won similarly prestigious honors including a Gramophone Prize in 2011 for the album Apollo e Dafne. Other recordings have been devoted to the music of Haydn, Giuseppe Sammartini, Barbara Strozzi, Luigi Rossi, Johann Caspar Kerll, and Girolamo Frescobaldi. The cantata cycle continued into the mid-2010s and was joined by recordings of smaller Handel chamber works in Italian. In 2016, La Risonanza, with soprano Raffaela Milanesi, issued a recording of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, one of their few recordings not devoted to Italian music, and in 2018 they began a new cycle of Bach keyboard concertos, played one instrument to a part with Bonizzoni at the keyboard.