La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler - The Rise of the North Italian Violin Concerto: 1690-1740 Volume One - The Dawn of the Virtuoso (2006)

The Vivaldian violin concerto seems such a classically simple thing with its chunky tutti sharply differentiated from spectacular solos. And Vivaldi wrote so fluently, wrote so many hundreds of works, that it's easy to assume he had solid preexisting models into which he needed only to pour his own inspiration. Listeners who have investigated the music of Torelli, Albinoni, and Corelli a bit know that it's not so simple. And now this disc makes manifest the full complexity of the concerto's early development. The project is the brainchild of British director and violinist Adrian Chandler and Vivaldi forms the tail end of the story told here. What was necessary to make the Baroque violin concerto, Chandler asks? The list turns out to be rather long. It includes 1) the formation of a genuine string orchestra, 2) the expressive instrumental counterpoint of the Corellian trio sonata, 3) the emergence of the solo/tutti contrast, 4) the classic three-movement concerto structure, and 5) the virtuoso element, among other smaller details. The pieces on the disc, whose composers include the well-known (Vivaldi, Albinoni), the moderately well-known (Legrenzi), and the unknown (Francesco Navara, Giuseppe Valentini, and the "Composer X" who wrote the solo cantata Laudate pueri Dominum studied by the young Vivaldi. The inclusion of a vocal work makes perfect sense, for one obvious model for instrumental solos was operatic vocalism, and the performance of this work by soprano Mhairi Lawson is worth the purchase price by itself with its dramatic contrast between Lawson's explosive voice and the tense, dry tones of Chandler's ensemble La Serenissima. The other works show how composers refined and simplified the variety of stylistic choices available to them at the end of the genuinely Baroque seventeenth century, even as they grew a basic five-part ensemble into something slightly larger and more variegated. The entire disc is worth hearing for those in search of anything from an enjoyable program of Baroque string music to a good starting point for a graduate-level seminar in Italian Baroque music.