Giovanni Guglielmo, Enrico Zanovello, Archicembalo Ensemble - Meneghetti: Concerti e Sonate (2013)

A comment in the booklet for this Italian release could serve as a credo for the Tactus label, which has unearthed a great deal of worthwhile Italian music, mostly of the eighteenth century: annotator Francesco Passadore urges the student of music history to "abandon the globalized academia of the great encyclopedias and turn his attention to sources which are less pretentious but nonetheless consistently reliable," namely historians focusing on specific localities. The composer explored here, Giovanni Meneghetti, worked in the never sexy but always significant city of Vicenza in northern Italy, between Venice and Milan, and the six concertos heard here, written perhaps around 1760 (the booklet offers no guidance here), reflect various trends that circulated in the area, which was something of a political and musical crossroads. They hover between the late Vivaldi style, which contributed more to Classicism than is generally recognized, and the galant styles whose headquarters at the time would have been Milan. Their most distinctive feature is that they retain aspects of the Vivaldian concerto grosso -- though designated as "concerto per violino," they don't have a sharp differentiation between soloist and orchestra; instead, Meneghetti has the soloist interact in various ways with solo instruments (mostly other violins) from within the small ensemble. Though violinist Giovanni Guglielmo and the players of the Archicembalo Ensemble could have executed them with a bit more snap, the textures of the work are subtle and intriguing, sounding unlike Tartini's music (which would be the nearest match for Meneghetti from a purely structural point of view) or anything else. Recommended for those with a strong interest in the fertile pre-Classical period.