Alessandro Scarlatti once said of the Baroque instruments of his day that they could never play in tune, and this collection of flute concertos, on the evidence provided by its soloist, seems to prove the point. Martino Noferi, who plays the recorder solos throughout this disc, reinvigorates the legacy of wayward pitch among the period instrument set to such a degree that bad intonation here becomes a perverse form of ornamentation.
In all of the slow sections, and in particular the Adagio of the A major Concerto for flute, two violins, and bass, you might imagine you are hearing a slide whistle instead of a recorder as the pitch literally swings (or swoons) a half-tone up or down from the given note. Oddly, Noferi exhibits none of these anomalies in the faster movements or in ensemble settings, where his technical facility is right on par with other fine recorder players. So, his pitch inflections are purposeful without any clear benefit to the performance.
And this is too bad, since the instrumental music of Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico’s father and better known as an opera composer) recently has captured the fancy of musicologists in a serious way, and good recordings of it are still few and far between. (For another sampling of his music, try Europa Galante’s traversal of works by both father and son on Veritas).
Salvaging this disc, which presents this concerto compilation for the first time in a complete recording, is crisp and vivacious playing by the 12 members of Il Rossignolo, led by Ottaviano Tenerani. CPO engineers the bass levels way too high, so the single double-bass and cello together create an unsettling boominess. If you can get past the soloist’s eccentricities, then there is no other place at the moment to hear these rare but pleasing works.
