Europa Galante was founded in 1990 by its current musical director, Fabio Biondi, whose aim was to create an Italian ensemble performing Baroque and Classical repertoire on period instruments. The artists perform in a changing line-up, focussing primarily on chamber music. The repertoire also includes operas by Handel (incl. Agrippina and Imeneo) and Vivaldi (incl. Ercole sul Termodonte and Oracolo in Messenia), as well as large instrumental works. The ensemble is renowned for its performances of works by Alessandro Scarlatti: oratorios (Maddalena, La Santissima Trinità), serenatas (Clori, Dorino e Amore) and operas (incl. Massimo Puppieno, Il Trionfo dell’Onore, La Principessa Fedele and Carlo Re d’Allemagna). Europa Galante works regularly with the Fondazione Santa Cecilia in Rome on restoring to musical life eighteenth-century Italian operas, such as Caldara’s La Passione di Gesù Cristo, Leo’s Sant’Elena al Calvario and Mayo’s Gesù sotto il peso della Croce. The ensemble has appeared in the world’s greatest concert halls, performing in Australia, Europe, South America, Canada, Israel, Japan and the US. Since the release of its first disc of Vivaldi concertos, Europa Galante has received multiple awards for its recordings of works by that composer, including two Grammy nominations (Concerti con molti strumenti, 2004; Bajazet, 2006) and a Diapason d’Or (I Concerti dell’Addio). The 2018/19 season will include performances in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. As part of a Monteverdi project, Europa Galante will also be touring Europe with Ian Bostridge and performing in Hamburg in a semi-staged version of the opera Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria. The ensemble has appeared four times at the Chopin and His Europe Festival in Warsaw, performing concert versions of Norma (2010) and I Capuleti e i Montecchi (2016), by Bellini, Verdi’s Macbeth (2017) and Moniuszko’s Halka in Italian language version (2018, a concert performance and recording). They were the first performances of those works on historical instruments in Poland.
