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Reviewer: Michael
De Sapio The cover photo for this recording shows an ornate 18th-century sofa placed against a sumptuously patterned wall, with framed portraits of the composers Charles Avison and Domenico Scarlatti. In looking at this, I was reminded of a comment a music professor once made about Italian art, to the effect that it combines beauty and functionality—perhaps a source of much of its perennial appeal. Certainly, 18th-century England was gripped in a veritable “Italian fever,” with Italian opera and the concertos and sonatas of Corelli being all the rage. So it is little surprise that in 1744 the English composer Charles Avison (1709–1770) published his Twelve Concertos in Seven Parts based on harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. Avison was a composer, teacher, impresario, and writer: His Essay on Musical Expression is a notable contribution to the 18th-century debate on aesthetics and contains sharply expressed opinions about his contemporaries’ music (Vivaldi, Locatelli, and Handel get low marks; Geminiani and Domenico Scarlatti are lauded). In arranging Scarlatti’s harpsichord pieces into four-movement concerti grossi, Avison—despite his admiration for the Italian master—had no qualms about expanding, trimming or otherwise “improving” upon the originals where he deemed fit. Thus, Avison’s opus could be thought of as a sort of musical gloss on Scarlatti, in which we hear both composers simultaneously. The concertos follow the standard slow-fast-slow-fast model. Several movements have no identifiable Scarlatti source, and it is altogether possible that Avison composed these movements himself in Scarlatti’s style. The concertino group consists of two violins and continuo, but the first violin more often than not holds center stage with a blisteringly challenging part, doing battle with the ripieno; this is concerto “contest” in its purest form. Scarlatti’s music is vivacious, quirky, at times passionately agitated, and Avison’s arrangements enhance these qualities. It would seem that the great challenge for period performers today is to reconcile the concern for musical gesture, rhetoric, and punctuation (so emphasized by Nikolaus Harnoncourt in his pioneering book Music as Speech) with the old-fashioned but never outmoded values of tonal finesse, cantabile, and line. One must delineate the details of Baroque musical syntax and at the same time feel the entire arc of the phrase as a singer would. (The vibrato issue, emphasized by many critics, is certainly a factor here but not the whole.) This can be a difficult balance to achieve. To be sure, Concerto Köln plays with an exciting vitality, especially in the fast movements; these renditions are anything but boring. But over time the excitement becomes over-stimulation and leads, ironically, to a feeling of routine, with excessively hard-driven tempos and a pursuit of momentary effect at the expense of the long line. In the slower movements we crave some repose from all the hyperactivity, but the Kölners never completely relax; there is always an edgy restlessness to their sound, and a sense of true cantabile and lyricism is lacking. The recorded sound is clear, bright, and on the close side, emphasizing the Kölners’ abrasiveness; I found myself putting the volume on my player down a few notches. While it was a nice idea to offer a “bonus track” featuring one of the original Scarlatti movements played on harpsichord, why not offer a couple more? There probably would have been room enough, and it would have made for an interesting comparison with the Avison arrangements.
In sum, this is interesting
repertoire—Avison, in particular, is a fascinating figure who deserves to be
explored—but the performances could have used more poise and less octane.
Other recordings exist by the Brandenburg Consort, Tafelmusik, Café
Zimmermann, and—not surprisingly—the Avison Ensemble. I have heard the Café
Zimmermann version, and it is more musical and polished, more refined in
phrasing than Concerto Köln’s, proving that one can have drama and
excitement with tone and a sense of line. | |
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