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Reviewer:
Charlotte Gardner
It’s not
often worth devoting many words of a CD review to the contents of the CD’s
booklet. However, what the Baroque violinist and musicologist Mark Seow has come
up with for Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque’s ‘Grandissima Gravita’ is nothing
short of genius: a theatre script, the action of which sees the four
violinist-composer stars of the album – Antonio Vivaldi, Giuseppe Tartini,
Francesco Maria Veracini and Johann Georg Pisendel – reclining tipsily on divans
in heaven (yes, really) for their annual wine-fuelled reunion. Seow’s imagined
pile of alcohol-fogged reminiscences covers all bases, from their admiration for
Corelli’s famous Op 5 collection and its historical-musical significance to
their backgrounds and the interlinking of their own careers; a reminder, for
instance, that Tartini discovered the violin while hiding in a monastery to
which he had fled after his controversial secret marriage was discovered, and
then how he left the monastery for Venice and heard Veracini’s tone and smooth
bowing, which inspired him to dedicate his own career to bow technique. Also
included are attitudes towards their contemporaries such as JS Bach, scandalous
gossip (the scurrilous story of how a practical joke from Pisendel was the
reason behind Veracini’s limp for instance, which the heavenly Veracini refutes
as the gossip of enemies), and even how the mid-18th-century European obsession
with alchemy found musical embodiment in the fugue, plus in musical devices such
as the one that begins the album’s programme-opener: Vivaldi’s Sonata for violin
and continuo in A major from Op 2, where the music ‘spirals and blossoms out of
a single chord’.
The performances
themselves are as stunning as the notes are imaginative, all four musicians both
completely under the music’s skin and under each other’s, and playing as a
smoothly dovetailed unit. Podger herself is exquisite; fluid, lilting and
multi-shaded, with gorgeous filigree ornamentations. Her fellow Brecon Baroque
members are equally faultless as sympathetic chamber partners, helped by
engineering (from St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead) that balances them slightly
behind, while equally drawing our ears towards qualities such as McGillivray’s
sensitive cello duetting, the plucked colour of Caminiti’s lute and guitar, and
Światkiewicz’s nimbly delicate harpsichord support.
There’s a sweet
little encore too, in the form of Vivaldi’s Adagio in E flat. This links
back to the C minor Sonata by Pisendel, for whom Vivaldi wrote this piece:
Seow’s heavenly Pisendel tells Vivaldi that he couldn’t have written the
sonata’s third movement Affetuoso ‘without your generous sound world in
mind’.
Programmed and
presented with flair, and faultlessly performed, this is a listening experience
of unbridled pleasure. An exceptional
album.
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