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When it comes to explosively vibrant album-opening chords, it takes some doing to top the Red-Bull-meets-fireworks-show shot of musical adrenalin served up each time by Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima. It’s very much business as usual with ‘Vivaldi x22’, the second instalment in a series devoted to the 55 or so double concertos, mostly for identical pairs of instruments, that Vivaldi wrote for those occasions when a single-instrument concerto didn’t feel quite festive enough.
The first instalment (9/18) was a multistylistic, kaleidoscopic affair featuring hunting horns, oboes, bassoons, violin and cello as its star instruments. This second, similarly diverse collection now presents pairs of violins, cellos, oboes, recorders and continuo – bookended by a couple of multiduo extravaganzas, the first of which, RV557 in C for two violins, two oboes, two recorders, strings and continuo, bursts in with suitably festively glowing, buoyantly sprung and nobly couched celebration. And warm grandeur is indeed very much this programme’s overall modus operandi, as you’ll hear if you compare their closing Concerto RV572 in F, Proteus, or The World Turned Upside Down, with the one recorded a few years ago by Gli Incogniti (Harmonia Mundi, A/22) – because while the French band offer a combination of speed, clipped articulation and semi-unbuttoned vim that calls to mind a Rameau-breathed, folky fairy dance, La Serenissima’s clear humour and bounce are instead couched – gorgeously – in terms of warmth, width and majesty.
Further pleasures: Vivaldi wrote just the one double recorder concerto, RV533 in C, but it’s a peach, and very much so here with Katy Bircher and Flavia Hirte’s gently chirruping virtuosity and mellow blending, and the closeness of their dialogue with earthily radiant-toned continuo cellist Vladimir Waltham – a relationship that’s already spun an expressively poised album highlight of RV557’s stately central continuo-accompanied recorder duet.
Pause, too, to enjoy Waltham truly in the spotlight, alongside fellow cellist Carina Drury, over RV531 in G minor, penned in the 1710s for church use: crispedged urgency in the outer moments, and injecting just enough sobriety into its central Largo’s sensuously florid overlappings to sound more sacred than sacrilegious. Or for a differently churchy flavour, head to the magisterial perkiness of RV534, which ditches the usual opening orchestral ritornello in favour of its pair of oboes leaping straight in with a joyous ‘Laudamus te’.
As for the violin concertos, I can’t get enough of Chandler and Oliver Cave’s superglued meeting of minds and complementary tones over RV516, where they squeeze every pip out of its drama, panache and sweetness to zinging ensemble support which, as across the album, imbues Vivaldi’s trademark pounding rhythms with sophisticated shaping and broadly conceived direction. In short, another fizzingly tip-top Italian feast. |
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