Federico Maria Sardelli

Portrait of Federico Maria in his library

Federico Maria Sardelli (born 1963) is an Italian conductor, historicist composer, musicologist, flautist, comics artist and satirist. He founded the medieval ensemble Modo Antiquo in 1984. In 1987 he founded the baroque orchestra Modo Antiquo. The orchestra made its debut with the first performance in modern times of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Ballet des Saisons.[1]

He is the main conductor of the Accademia Barocca di S. Cecilia (Rome) and guest conductor of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Staatskapelle Halle, Kammerakademie Potsdam, Moscow State Chamber Orchestra, etc.

He has recorded more than forty Albums as soloist and conductor, published by the labels Naïve, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Brilliant, Tactus. A notable protagonist in the Vivaldi renaissance, he performed, recorded and edited a large number of Vivaldi compositions, often in world premiere (Arsilda, regina di Ponto, Orlando Furioso, Tito Manlio, Motezuma, L'Atenaide, etc.). He has been nominated twice for the Grammy Award (1997 and 2000)[2] and on November 28, 2009 the Government of Tuscany awarded Sardelli with the Gonfalone d'Argento,[3] the highest medal of honour of the Regione Toscana.

He is a member of the Scientific Board of the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, for which he has published several essays and monographs, among them "Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder", Ashgate Publishing, 2007, in the translation of Michael Talbot.[4]

In July 2007 Peter Ryom appointed him as his heir to continue his monumental work of cataloging the music of Antonio Vivaldi, and since then Federico Maria is responsible for the Ryom-Verzeichnis (RV).[5] In December 2014 he and Francisco Javier Lupiáñez Ruiz, a Spanish violinist on a Master’s programme at the Royal Conservatory of Music at The Hague, independently identified the earliest known work of Vivaldi, which he has catalogued as RV 820.[6]

Federico Maria Sardelli manuscript (Concerto per due violoncelli piccoli in A minor, 2010)

In 2015 he published his first novel "L'affare Vivaldi",[7] (Sellerio), a historical investigation into the disappearance of Vivaldi's manuscripts. In addition to his musical activities, Sardelli is also a painter, engraver and satirical writer.

Federico M. Sardelli, Selfportrait, 2001 (oil on canvas, 80 x 80)

Books and Essays

Federico M. Sardelli, Catalogo delle concordanze musicali vivaldiane, 2009

Selected discography

Critical editions

Comic works

Sardelli is a longtime collaborator on the satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere and contributes through his satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch. His nonsensical style resembles that of Monty Python and Luis Buñuel, but he has a recognizable style of his own rooted in Tuscan popular humor. Sardelli, as a comic author, constructs elaborate parodies of Padre Pio or of Italian sagre (popular festivals that Italian farming communities once often organized); the so-called Proesie ("Proetries") that are ineffable nonsense works. His Le Più Belle Cartoline Del Mondo ("Most Beautiful Postcards Of The World") are elaborate stories built around 60s and 70's kitsch postcards, often representing children or couples, written in an absurdly baroque and archaic style and lexicon. A recurring character in these stories is that of the fictional dwarf Gargilli Gargiulo.

Characters and comic-strips by Sardelli include:

Clem Momigliano: an improbable detective whose character blatantly lampoons mainstream heroic characters of adventure comics. Like Mandrake he has a coloured sidekick, Negro Balongo, which he unashamedly exploits as a slave. Most of Clem's adventures begin with a classic opener mocking adventure comics and have an improbable mission issued by a mysterious "Chief", only to collapse miserably because of some trivial impediment such as the neighbour using Clem's rocket to anchor her laundry line.

Il Bibliotecario ("The Librarian"): a peculiar comic strip made always of two-frames variations on the same theme: in the first the librarian greets an unnamed elderly woman with a flowery and archaic sentence and the woman will ask for an impossibly difficult to find ancient book, such as the "Gabinetto Armonico" of Filippo Bonanni. In the second frame the librarian will reply with totally unconnected and, more often than not, heavily offensive behaviour.

Merda ("Shit"): a mute strip where various characters are nonsensically obsessed by their relationship with excrement.

Circo ("Circus"): about the adventures of a circus whose animals indulge in embarrassing activities just when the show is to start.

Comic bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "E sull'acqua scivola un barcone carico di note", Il Tirreno, 14 July 1987
  2. ↑ Los Angeles Times, "The Complete List of Nominees", January 08, 1997
  3. ↑ "Festa Toscana, Nencini consegna nove Gonfaloni d'argento del Consiglio Regionale", Adnkronos, 28 November 2009
  4. ↑ Jane Bowers, "Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder by Federico Sardelli", Performance Practice Review, vol. 13, No 1.
  5. ↑ Peter Ryom: "La situation actuelle de la musicologie vivaldienne", proceedings of the conference "Vivaldi, passato e futuro", Venice, Fondazione G. Cini, 13-16 June 2007.
  6. ↑ Prof. Michael Talbot: ", Michael Talbot, "On the Cusps of Stylistic Change: Vivaldi’s Sonata RV 820 for Violin, Cello and Continuo and its Seventeenth-Century Roots"
  7. ↑ Leonetta Bentivoglio: "Il giallo Vivaldi e le carte sparite", La Repubblica, 16 April 2015
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