Varieties of Vivaldi

The five new Vivaldi CDs under review illustrate some current trends in the performance of Baroque music. They range from 'crossover' performances by a modern-instrument group under the influence of historically informed performance to what Thurston Dart used to call 'knitting your own Baroque'.

The good news first: Zefiro specializes in Baroque and Classical music featuring wind instruments, and includes the cream of Italian period-instrument wind players, including Paolo Grazzi and Alfredo Bernadini (oboes) and Alberto Grazzi (bassoon). Vivaldi: Concerti per vari strumenti (Opus 111 Naïve, OP30409, rec 2004) is part of a project to record all the music in the Vivaldi autographs at Turin, and mixes solo concertos (oboe, RV454, and bassoon, RV497) with double concertos (two oboes, RV534, and oboe and violin, RV548) and group concertos (two oboes and two clarinets, RV559, 560, and two violins, two recorders, two oboes and bassoon, RV 566). The playing is superb. As we might expect from musicians of the calibre of the Grazzis and Bernadini, there are no technical problems at all, the wind instruments (including an original Anciuti oboe of 1730) sound wonderful, the tempos are well chosen, and the playing is flexible and expressive in a way that serves the music instead of drawing attention to itself. My main reservation is that they do not seem to have thought about what size of accompanying group is appropriate. A small orchestra (3-3-1-1-1 plus keyboard and archlute or guitar) is used for everything, but it sometimes sounds too much for the small-scale concertos. As Richard Maunder has pointed out in his book The scoring of Baroque concertos (Woodbridge, 2004), the norm for Venetian concertos seems to have been just single strings. Conversely, as Louis Vatoison suggests in his intelligent notes, the fine D minor concerto RV566 was probably written for the Dresden orchestra, where concertos were often played with large string groups, to judge from surviving parts. But this is a quibble. All the concertos are delightful, and with performances as good as this anyone interested in Vivaldi or period performance should buy it immediately.

Vivaldi: Music for the Chapel of the Pietà (Avie AV2063, rec 2004) from Adrian Chandler and his group La Serenissima has also much to commend it. It consists of two solo violin concertos (in F major, RV292 and D major, RV212), one for violin and organ (in F major, RV542), one for violin, cello and organ (in C major, RV554a) and two vocal works with soprano Mhairi Lawson, the Laudate pueri (in C minor, RV600) and the Salve regina (in F major, RV617). One of the most praiseworthy features of this recording is its avoidance of hackneyed works. Despite more than 30 years of playing and listening to Vivaldi, I can't recall coming across any of these pieces before. They are all worth hearing, with the possible exception of the rather routine violin and organ concerto, and several of them are very fine. I was particularly struck by the extraordinarily virtuosic D major violin concerto, written in 1712 for a feast at St Anthony's Basilica in Padua, and the two vocal works. The early Laudate pueri is similar in many respects to the much better-known Nisi DominusRV608, and is by no means inferior to it. Similarly, the Salve regina, scored for soprano, violin, strings and continuo, makes an interesting contrast to the well-known double-choir setting for solo alto RV617, and is also a delightful work-pace Michael Talbot (The-sacred music of Antonio Vivaldi (Florence, 1995), p.256), who criticizes the last movement for 'thin, sometimes awkward, harmony and total lack of melodic memorability'.

It all depends, of course, on the performance. Mhairi Lawson has the right sort of flexible voice, and is very good at expressing the words and getting the character of particular movements. She makes the movement in question sound expressive and touching, though I'm not sure I would go as far as Chandler, who describes it in his (generally excellent) notes as 'one...