Elizabeth Wallfisch, The Raglan Baroque Players, Nicholas Kraemer - Locatelli - L’Arte del Violino (2010)

This box set collects four individual albums of the early '90s by veteran historical-instrument violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch and the Raglan Baroque Players, each containing three of the 12 violin concertos included here. The box, although not issued in Hyperion's budget Helios series, is offered at a cut-rate price. Locatelli was a pure virtuoso; he was no Vivaldi, and these works had one purpose and one only: to display his nearly unthinkable capabilities on the violin. As such, the entire set may be of more interest to performers and specialists than to general listeners; three CDs of Locatelli are bit much. However, one can understand that for a player of the Baroque violin, L'arte del violino is something of a summation of a life's work; the fine booklet notes by Albert Dunning (given in English, Italian, French, and German) make the point that an audience of Locatelli's time would have understood that title the same way as Bach's Art of Fugue, as indicating an exhaustive exploration of the ultimate possibilities of a given form. The concertos follow a fairly predictable form; they are in three movements, fast-slow-fast, with each fast movement containing a cadenza-like capriccio at the end. These first rise to the very top of the violin's range and then enter into multiple-stopped polyphonic extravaganzas, and there are also less evident technical challenges. They're less varied than Paganini's Caprices, but they are their clear ancestors and may even have been known to Paganini. Hyperion's engineering still sounds good, and for students and adherents of any kind of the Baroque violin this is a desirable item.