Adrian Chandler and his orchestra La Serenissima have been poking around Vivaldi for years now, and doing it very well indeed. Some time back, SFCV reviewed a CD titled Vivaldi: The French Connection; now comes Son of “The French Connection” — no, make that Vivaldi: The French Connection 2. It may be even more fun than its predecessor.
I have to hand it to Chandler: Not only is everything here played to a crack standard, but this is the least hackneyed Vivaldi program I’ve seen in some time. The only work here most listeners have a sporting chance of having encountered before is the chamber version of La notte, RV 104 — a brief depiction of the night, for flute, bassoon, two violins, and continuo, complete with nightmares and more peaceful dreams.
Otherwise, we have three of Vivaldi’s bracing little string concertos; a real oddity in the shape of a four-movement concerto wherein two movements have no soloists, and the other two a solo line played by oboe and violin in unison; a fantastically difficult bassoon concerto; two flute concertos, one discovered only last year (and recorded here for the first time); and one violin concerto, also a world premiere recording.
Listen To The Music
Concerto Intitolato La Notte in g RV 104 - IConcerto Il Gran Mogol in d RV 431a - I
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To the new discovery first: Il gran mogol, RV 431a, turned up in 2010 (minus its second violin part) in a collection that the National Archives of Scotland had bought nearly a decade before. The title, which presumably refers to the Mughal Empire of India, appears in a Dutch publisher’s catalog alongside three other concertos — all apparently lost — named after France, Spain, and England.
Flutists hoping for something to rival the spectacular Vivaldi violin concerto titled Il grosso mogul, or for that matter anything in the way of Oriental local color, are apt to be disappointed. This is a pretty small-scale piece, not easy but not full of drama. It doesn’t try to sound Indian, or French either for that matter — the sole “French Connection” here is that the manuscript is written on French paper.
Elsewhere the “Frenchiness” here is of a more audible kind. The three ripieno string concertos come from a set of a dozen believed to have been written to a French commission, and — like several pieces here — two of them open with the sort of flourishes beloved of French overture composers, while the third starts with a movement that’s a bourrée in everything but name. Dance movements were a French specialty; so was a kind of melody laden with stylized sighs (appoggiaturas). We get examples of all of these here.
The playing on this disc is uniformly top-notch. The double reeds, especially, are magnificent. Gail Hennessy, the oboist, makes a smooth, rich sound in RV 243 (inexplicably mislabeled RV 239 in one place in the notes), and blends so seamlessly with Chandler, doubling her, that the effect is of a single instrument with a timbre you can’t quite place. Peter Whelan, the bassoonist, has an irresistibly plummy tone and rather fantastic agility, especially in the killer finale of RV 473 — a minuet en rondeau in which each solo episode seems determined to one-up the previous one.
Katy Bircher handles both Il gran mogol and her other concerto, RV 440, nimbly and stylishly. And Chandler himself ends the disc with the other premiere recording, RV 365, with aplomb. As for the strings-only concertos, they are little firebombs — short (only one movement tops two minutes), fierce, and played with great unanimity of purpose.