Modern Version of Vivaldi

Supreme master of the Baroque concerto and one of the finest composers of sacred music, Vivaldi is now also being rediscovered as an opera composer of genius. Some credit for this must go to Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco, whose performances of Giustino since 1985 have made this colourful and dramatic work the most widely played of Vivaldi's operas in modern times. Giustino contains an endless flow of Vivaldian melodic inspiration and inventive orchestration; the score calls for a psaltery and for birdsong, while the goddess Fortune descends to the tune of Spring from the Four Seasons. This first recording is based on a concert performance in Rotterdam in 2001; the fine cast is headed by Dominique Labelle as the empress Arianna and Francesca Provvisionato as the plough-boy emperor Giustino.

There is no complete surviving score for Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte, but there is enough existing material that modern scholars have been able to reconstruct it primarily by making new settings of the lost recitatives. The first production of the opera since Vivaldi's time was at Spoleto in 2006 in a version by Alessandro Ciccolini, which was released as a DVD. Conductor Fabio Biondi made a version introduced in Venice in 2007, which is recorded on this 2010 Virgin CD. Biondi's recording has the advantage of two international superstars in the leading roles, tenor Rolando Villazón and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and soprano Diana Damrau is nearly in their league. Villazón's earthy voice is usually associated with 19th century and verismo Italian repertoire, but he has an acute sensitivity to Baroque vocal style, and his robust, almost baritonal tenor is entirely appropriate for a larger-than-life character like Hercules.

If anyone has earned the right to mess around with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons it is Nigel Kennedy, the violin world’s Marmite violinist. Remember how fresh he made this music sound on his recording of a quarter-century ago? This latest version offers a ferment of all he’s played since – concertos, jazz, Jimi Hendrix. It’s affectionate and irreverent in equal measure, and Kennedy and his Orchestra of Life never sound less than riveting. Pretty much all Vivaldi’s notes are there; around, above and in between them come interjections, overlays and linking passages involving guest musicians from jazz and rock: Orphy Robinson, Damon Reece, Z-Star and others. Spring is welcomed in by a distant-sounding intro on an electric-guitar. Summer’s storms bring forth bursts of crazily sampled static. Autumn tears off at a cracking pace, but with a jazz trumpet sauntering lazily over the top. It all sounds like a colossal jam session from the inside of a Botticelli painting.

Michala Petri’s version of Vivaldi’s Six Flute Concertos op. 10 with the Academy of Saint-Martin-In-The-Fields under its first fiddler Iona Brown was recorded in July 1980 – almost the prehistory of Vivaldi interpretation, seen 35 years later. And after all, yes, 1980 is almost exactly the middle point between the beginning of the great 20th century Vivaldi revival, heralded by Louis Kaufman’s ground-breaking recording of the Four Seasons on Concert Hall in 1948 (Vivaldi: Twelve Concertos, Op. 8), and today.

Naxos intend to record Vivaldi’s entire orchestral corpus, and Raphael Wallfisch’s integral four-disc survey of the 27 cello concertos inaugurates this visionary, though plainly Herculean undertaking. Soloist and orchestra employ modern instruments; director Nicholas Kraemer contends that authentic protocols can be ably met by contemporary ensembles and, in articulation, style and ornamentation, these pristine, engaging readings have little to fear from period practitioners. Wallfisch’s pointed, erudite and spirited playing is supported with enlightened restraint by the CLS, directed from either harpsichord or chamber organ by Kraemer, whose sensitive continuo team merits high praise throughout. Without exception, these Concertos adopt an orthodox fast-slow-fast three-movement format. Wallfisch, dutifully observant in matters of textual fidelity, plays outer movements with verve, energy and lucidity, such that high-register passagework, an omnipresent feature of these works, is enunciated with the pin-sharp focus of Canaletto’s images of 18th-century Venice, which adorn the covers of these issues.

Giovanni Antonini, virtuoso flautist and orchestral conductor, is the founder of the Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, which burst on the baroque musical scene in 1985; together they have amassed an impressive discography.
With Antonini as soloist in a programme of his own devising recorded between 2011 and 2017, a generous bouquet of the Concerti per Flauto: RV 433 (‘La Tempesta di Mare’), plus the Concertos RV 441, 442 443, 444, and 445, and an amazing version of ‘Cum Dederit’, a solo from Nisi Dominus RV 608, for the chalumeau, the predecessor to the modern-day clarinet.

The Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) is a British period-instrument orchestra based in Cambridge, England. Founded by harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood in 1973, it was named after an 18th-century organisation of the same name (originally the Academy of Vocal Music). The musicians play on either original instruments from the period when the music was composed or modern copies of such instruments. They generally play Baroque, Classical, and sometimes Romantic music, though they have also played some new compositions for baroque orchestra in recent years.

Over the last 20 years, the Naxos label has done a great deal to obtain its reputation as one of the leading classical guitar labels. Its very first guitarist was Gerald Garcia, who was not slow to show the way forward by extending the rather limited guitar repertoire by making arrangements of pieces originally written for other instruments. This is what he has done here, too: None of the music on this disc was written for guitar, it is all arranged by Garcia himself, who plays a modern guitar and definitely not a baroque instrument.

In Holland in the 1720s the transverse flute enjoyed considerable popularity among amateur musicians. Aware of that keen interest, the publisher Michel Le Cene decided in 1729 to present his customers with the very first collection of concertos for flute and orchestra. Vivaldi responded to his request by refurbishing several older works. Only one of them was already in the modern concerto form: the Concerto in F major for recorder and strings. Another four pieces were hybrid in form and still close to chamber works. The predominant role of the recorder or flute in those four concertos made them ideal for adaptation.