Viotti Complete

First recordings of concertos by a legendary virtuoso of the Italian Baroque. Concert master at the Teatro alla Scala since 2014, Laura Marzadori studied with Salvatore Accardo and Giuliano Carmignola, as well as playing in the Orchestra Mozart under Claudio Abbado. She has given chamber-music concerts with internationally renowned soloists such as Antonio Meneses, Andrea Lucchesini and Bruno Giuranna, and worked as a concert master for some of the world’s great conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Riccardo Chailly and Antonio Pappano. She gave the world premiere performances of Respighi’s Violin Concerto in 2011, followed by a warmly received recording of the piece. She has also recorded the beautiful but little-known concerto by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.

Lolli has received relatively little attention in modern times. I haven’t, for example, been able to trace a single reference to him in the pages of MusicWeb International. Despite this he holds a rather prominent place in that line of Italian violin virtuosi which runs from a figure such as Biagio Marini through Corelli and Tartini to Paganini and Viotti. The musicologist Albert Mell has, not unreasonably, written of him that he “was from many points of view the most important violin virtuoso before Paganini” (Musical Quarterly, Vol. 44, 1958) and Simon McVeigh (in The Cambridge Companion to the Violin) has described him as “the archetypal travelling virtuoso”.