Vivaldi Project

Michelle Barzel Ross is an Iraqi(Mizrahi)-American violinist, composer, and improviser. A protégé of Itzhak Perlman, Michelle is known for her debut album, pop-up project and blog Discovering Bach: Complete Sonatas and Partitas of J.S. Bach. A gifted improviser across genres, Michelle is featured on Movement 11’ of the GRAMMY winning Best Album of the Year: We Are, by Jon Batiste. This season, Michelle has the honor of performing with the Juilliard String Quartet as guest first violinist for their winter International and US tours, while Areta Zhulla is on maternity leave.

Known for her idiosyncratic performances of baroque repertoire and eccentric personal style, the German coloratura soprano Simone Kermes trained in her native Leipzig, with early successes including the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. Bach has not, however, figured prominently in her career since then – Kermes gravitated towards Vivaldi, Handel and the Neapolitan composers who wrote for the great castrati, such as Riccardo Broschi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Porpora. (She has recorded several solo albums of such repertoire for Sony, including Dramma, and Colori d’Amore – reviewing the latter, BBC Music Magazine described her as ‘a remarkable artist, charming, fascinating and boldly risk-taking by turns’).

After calling it ‘a wonderful album in all respects’, the magazine Diapason concluded its review of Suite Case Violin Duos from Vivaldi to Sollima (A448) with the question, ‘When can we look forward to the second volume?’ In this new project, the violin of Stefano Barneschi gives way to the cello of Giovanni Sollima, the multi-talented musician from Palermo featured here not only as a composer. On this new journey, again beginning with Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Sollima and Chiara Zanisi travel between early and modern music, between classical and folk (the Old Scots Tunes of Francesco Barsanti), with two previously unrecorded gems by the Roman composer Giovanni Battista Costanzi. The entire recording is punctuated by tracks taken from Suite Case, a cycle composed especially by Sollima for this project.

The refined period performances of Vivaldi's chamber concertos by the fabulous L'Astrée ensemble make this album a delightful experience, and despite Opus 111's questionable packaging, the label deserves high marks for providing exquisite sound quality and for devoting serious attention to a worthy project. Part of a series surveying all the manuscripts in the Vivaldi collection of the National University Library in Turin, this volume presents nine works in various combinations for flute, recorder, oboe, bassoon, violin, cello, theorbo, guitar, and harpsichord. Best-known of the selections is the Concerto in D major, RV 90, "Il gardellino," celebrated for its gentle lyricism and clever mimicry a goldfinch. Also familiar is the Concerto in D major, RV 95, "La pastorella," which features a vivid depiction of a rustic dance in the third movement. The remaining concertos are equally enjoyable, for L'Astrée's vibrant playing and the transparent timbres of its original instruments bring crispness, spontaneity, and even a feeling of novelty to Vivaldi's music.

- -Blair Sanderson

London Baroque offers another installment in its ongoing European Trio Sonata series, this time devoted to 18th-century Italy; as with the ensemble’s previous efforts the program features generally excellent performances of lesser-known repertoire. Ten years ago I reviewed a similar 18th-century Italian program by this same group titled “Stravaganze Napoletane”, also on BIS, and was generally impressed with the performances–except for one piece: Domenico Gallo’s Sonata No. 1 in G major.

A rare project of Vivaldi's Viola d'Amore Concerto performed with viola d'amore, mandolin & guitar orchestra! Vivaldi composed several concertos for solo viola d'amore for his students at the Pietà Conservatory.