The Academia Montis Regalis Foundation is a Piedmontese institution that has been actively promoting Early Music for years. In 1994, it started a Baroque and classical music orchestra with the goal of presenting a repertoire from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries according to historical criteria and by using original instruments.
To this end, the Foundation established Academia Montis Regalis, which was conducted since the beginning by the most important Early Music specialists on the international level: Ton Koopman, Jordi Savall, Christopher Hogwood, Reinhardt Goebel, Monica Huggett, Luigi Mangiocavallo, Enrico Gatti and Alessandro De Marchi, to mention but a few.
During the following years, the Orchestra started an important association with the French label OPUS 111 and was invited by Turin’s Unione Musicale to participate in producing the Altro Suono festival, entirely dedicated to Early Music.
These partnerships gave the Orchestra prestige and visibility, which contributed to making it one of the most well-respected professional ensembles in Italy and abroad, with regular appearances in some of the most important concert events and festivals, such as: the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome; the Amici della Musica in Perugia, Florence and Padua; the Mi.To Settembre Musica festival in Turin; the Théâtre de l'Opera in Lille; the Théâtre Municipal in Lausanne; the Montreux Festival; the Théâtre Poissy; the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris; the Early Music Festival in Lyon; the Vancouver Festival, the Halle Festival and the Innsbruck Festival; and Turin’s Teatro Regio. The Orchestra also won many international awards for its recordings, such as the Diapason d’Or, the Choque du Monde de la Musique, and the Gramophone Choice.
For the past few years, Academia Montis Regalis has appointed Alessandro De Marchi as its conductor. De Marchi is a successful Italian conductor, with whom the orchestra has worked on an important recording project called Vivaldi Edition, which aims to record all of the manuscripts by Vivaldi held in Turin’s National Library. The first CD in the collection by Academia Montis Regalis, Juditha Triumphans, was a great international success; four more recordings followed, amongst which the Orlando Finto Pazzo opera and a series of concerts for violin and strings with Enrico Onofri.
The orchestra also recorded three Roman School oratorios from the early eighteenth century: Haendel’s The Triumph of Time and Truth, Alessandro Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista, and Alessandro Scarlatti’s Davidis Pugna et Victoria.
Since 2010, Academia Montis Regalis has been the resident orchestra of the prestigious Innsbrucker Festwochen Festival, where it stages a Baroque opera every year and leads various chamber music projects. The first two operas performed so far at the Landestheater in Innsbruck were the critically acclaimed L'Olimpiade by Pergolesi and Flavius Bertaridus by Telemann, both recorded live by Sony Classics, with which Academia Montis Regalis is currently planning more important recordings.
Many more projects are in store for the next few seasons, such as the full performance of the Christmas Oratorio by Bach at the Festspielhaus in Baden Baden and another oratorio, Bernardo Pasquini’s La sete di Cristo, during Krakow’s International Festival of Sacred Music.
Academia Montis Regalis also performs in small ensembles without conductor, having acquired L’Astrée, a prestigious instrumental group that represents its chamber music counterpart.
In 2005, Academia Montis Regalis was awarded the Abbiati Prize for artistic achievements in the field of Early Music.
