Another major discovery in the early music field courtesy of legendary producer Wolf Erichson, the Venice Baroque Orchestra and violinist Giuliano Carmignola turn in a performance of The Four Seasons as fine as any. Carmignola has the technique to take the music’s virtuoso passages in stride (check out any of the finales) without ever sacrificing intonation or firmness of tone, and he doesn’t “squeeze” out the notes as so many old instrument violinists today do. The interpretations offer numerous distinctive turns of phrase, especially at the ends of movements where, without huge ritards or abrupt stops, conductor Andrea Marcon manages a gentle landing that sounds both satisfying and inevitable. He also gives the slow movements their due without minimizing their Romantic charm: compare, for example, his deliciously seductive middle movement of “Winter” with Harnoncourt’s stressful, bump and grind approach. In short, Carmignola and Marcon manage to find that elusive balance between the need for formal coherence and the music’s descriptive qualities, with the singularly satisfying result that you can take the pieces either as illustrations of the scenes that Vivaldi describes in the (thoughtfully included) poems preceding each concerto, or simply as delightfully tuneful music. Either way, these performances work.
The three additional violin concertos–the disc claims that they are recording premieres, and life is too short for me to bother to see if this is true or not–provide an even better reason to acquire this disc, even if you already have 10 or 12 Four Seasons in your collection. They are marvelous works, especially the big D major concerto that at nearly 16 minutes assumes dimensions of positively Bachian richness and complexity. In fact, this work would grace any “normal concert” (violinists take note), and it proves once again that the old charge that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 600 times simply isn’t true. As implied above, the Venice Baroque Orchestra plays all of this music with warmth, virtuosity, and a fine, singing tone. Sony captures them in ideally balanced, clear and natural recorded sound. Although Sony may not be doing much in the classical music field these days, its recent releases (Salonen’s Bach transcriptions, Perahia’s Goldberg Variations) have all been winners. This newcomer is no exception.
