RECORD REVIEWS
Forget almost everything you know about Vivaldi performance practice, authentic and otherwise, and shush all “shoulds.” Banish from your mind any thoughts that all Vivaldi sounds the same. Prepare your ears to hear Vivaldi as you’ve never heard him before.
Blame what pours forth, if blame you must, on the astounding barefoot wonder, Moldovan-Austrian-Swiss violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Using her copies of a Baroque-era Gagliano violin and bow to play like an altitude-defying mountain climber bounding from precipice to precipice, Kopatchinskaja knows nothing of caution as she propels five of Vivaldi’s early 18th century Violin Concertos into our era. With Giovanni Antonini and his superb 15-member period instrument ensemble, Il Giardino Armonico, as equal daredevils, she does more than blow away close to four centuries of cobwebs. Kopatchinskaja approaches Vivaldi’s music through a 2020 lens, determined to affirm his music’s vital importance during an era when other concerns dominate the zeitgeist.
Yes, them’s strong words. But What’s Next Vivaldi?, which punctuates concertos by the master with contemporary compositions written mostly for the recording, makes a statement that’s equally strong. The opening work, Vivaldi’s Concerto in Eflat major, RV 253 La tempesta di mare, lives up to its name, with a tempestuous opening movement that’s almost 20 seconds faster than Fabio Biondi and Europa Gallante’s older and flattersounding recording for Erato; Biondi didn’t engage in any of the extramusical effects that, on the new recording, may cause a thought bubble, as in “?!?!?!?!”, to emerge, cartoonlike, from the top of your head.
RV 253’s Largo is almost 30 seconds slower than Biondi’s—that’s a big difference in a concerto that lasts a bit more than 8 minutes—and it renders the interpretation more profound. The concluding Presto is nine seconds slower than Biondi’s; that slight broadening allows its felicities to sink in deeper while daredevil Kopatchinskaja scales its peaks with soaringly sweet highs.
After La tempesta di mare, a 41-second quasi-spontaneous vocal free-for-all leads into Aureliano Cattaneo’s energetic, short Estroso. All three expressions—the Vivaldi, the free-for-all, and the Cattaneo—seem curiously cut from the same cloth.
After the Cattaneo comes Vivaldi’s RV 157 concerto, then Luca Francesconi’s less-than-4-minute Spiccato il volo (The Violin Takes Off), which some might be inclined to accept as Vivaldi at his most extreme. Next up, Vivaldi’s Concerto RV 191, with an astoundingly beautiful 4-minute middlemovement whose execution epitomizes the paradox of constant movement within a framework of stillness. Then, Simone Movio’s 4-minute “seeks to synthesize the forms and structures of a Baroque concerto into a microarchitecture that allows us to glimpse its core under its outer envelope”—so say the liner notes—and composers Marco Stroppa and Giovanni Sollima offer other ways of using Vivaldi’s music as springboards for contemporary musical exploration.
