In the Europe of the first half of the seventeenth century, instrumental music became a source of sonic and expressive experimentation. Influenced by vocal rhetoric, composers sought to replace words with a new musical language. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists developed, as did invention, improvisation and the search for surprising sonorities. Along with the organ or the harpsichord, the violin was the instrument of choice for experimenting with these new techniques. Italian and German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Farina, Schmelzer, Mealli, Buxtehude, Biber, Pisendel and Bach vied with each other in imaginativeness… The violinist Chouchane Siranossian and the harpsichordist Leonardo García Alarcón – both loyal Alpha Classics artists – have chosen to explore this repertory, here including Bach’s sonatas BWV 1019, 1021 and 1023 among other pieces.
“For this recording we have created an imaginary ‘battle of the bows’ between Vivaldi, Veracini, Tartini and Locatelli, the ‘four musketeers’ of the violin in Venice during the first half of the 18th century”, said Chouchane Siranossian and Andrea Marcon. “Corelli died in 1713 and passed the torch on to his heirs… Venice then became the setting for merciless rivalries. The violin became an instrument of confrontation, an ideal weapon for demonstrating virtuosity and technical prowess. The player’s ultimate goal was to astonish the listener and to demonstrate his own bravura, to the point that certain narcissistic tendencies of the player were often exaggerated.” Chouchane Siranossian, whose virtuosity was described as "diabolical" by the Sunday Times and who “hit the nail on the head” according to Classica on her Tartini recording (Alpha596, Choc), is the ideal interpreter of these high-risk concertos, with the fresh and knowledgeable support of Andrea Marcon and his Venetian ensemble.
After several recordings with Anima Eterna and Jos Van Immerseel, the French violinist Chouchane Siranossian tackles a programme of extremely virtuosic concertos that few Baroque violinists dare to face. Thanks to her technical gifts and to partners ideally suited to this repertory – the Venice Baroque Orchestra and its conductor Andrea Marcon, a specialist in the Italian Baroque style – she takes up the challenge with brio. This album is released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Tartini’s death in 2020. Of special interest is a completely unknown and unpublished concerto in G major, the manuscript of which was recently found by the musicologist Margherita Canale.
The two Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Flute and for two Cellos by Antoine Reicha show an astonishing balance between innovation and reflection. They bear witness to an outstanding virtuosity and art of composition, which revolutionise forms through spectacular, enthusiasm-provoking lines of execution and through novelties of writing that impact their deeper structures. A composer who established a link between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Vienna and Paris, Joseph Haydn and César Franck (one of the last among his many pupils), Reicha can no longer be reduced to his theoretical and didactic dimension alone: his extensive work, still too little known, continues to surprise us.
Born in Lower Saxony just three years before Beethoven, the violinist Andreas Romberg (1767-1821) was, like him, a virtuoso instrumentalist of precocious gifts. His career too was radically affected by the Napoleonic Wars and a formative encounter with Haydn. And, as with Beethoven, his most popular work was a choral setting of a poem by Schiller: Das Lied von der Glocke, premiered in 1809. Romberg wrote an enormous number of violin concertos, but only sixteen manuscript scores of his entire oeuvre have survived, all of them in Hamburg. Chouchane Siranossian has decided to revive and make the world premiere recording of three concertos, thus revealing an interesting composer and a trio of highly virtuosic works.
After several recordings with Anima Eterna and Jos Van Immerseel, the French violinist Chouchane Siranossian tackles a programme of extremely virtuosic concertos that few Baroque violinists dare to face. Thanks to her technical gifts and to partners ideally suited to this repertory the Venice Baroque Orchestra and its conductor Andrea Marcon, a specialist in the Italian Baroque style she takes up the challenge with brio. This album is released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Tartinis death in 2020. Of special interest is a completely unknown and unpublished concerto in G major, the manuscript of which was recently found by the musicologist Margherita Canale.