Naples Soloists, Salvatore Accardo - Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Concertos for 3 & 4 Violins (1988)

Salvatore Accardo is a dynamic violinist who specializes in both Italian Baroque and Paganini. His performance here is demonstrative on the range of his talents and his mastery of both the Italian Baroque and Romantic styles of violin. His performance on a Stradivarius for this piece simply adds to the resonance and clarity of his playing. The fact that he can play a Stradivarius so well is already the mark of his quality as a performer as many professional musicians often find themselves in slippery territory with this unique instrument.

There is also another epic performance that is either equal to or surpasses this one and it is Pina Carmirelli's 1982 performance with I Musici for whom Acardo had also performed various works including 'The Four Seasons' before in the '70s as a soloist. I Musici also uses Stradivarius strings and are equally comparable if not better than the performers here. In either case, both performances are two of maybe no more than twelve epic performances that are worth listening to: the rest is not even worthy of being called average and so worth neither your time or money. Pieces by Perlman or other similar virtuosos are not really comparable as there is a great difference between traditional chamber ensembles of 14 to an orchestral symphony having 100 or more performers that usually accompanies their performances. The accompanying instruments are also all modern usually. Although great in their class, I tend to be a Baroque purist as a listener and, under those standards, such virtuosos fail to match Accardo or Carmirelli because they are not specialists in the Italian style generally and the Italian Baroque one least of all. Such virtuosos have great interpretations of Baroque works in their proper specialties which are the German and Polish Romantic traditions such as those of Beethoven and mostly Joseph Joachim. They are also virtuosos of the unique Jewish Klezmer tradition of violin that has much in common with the Gypsy and Polish traditions of violin but very little with even the German Baroque method.

In the category of traditional Baroque Italian performances with period instruments then, in terms of both utmost quality of performance as well as recording quality, this is pretty much one of the top five without question and the rest of the remaining four would probably mostly be filled by I Musici and the countless Italian prodigy soloists such as Accardo himself and Pina Carmirelli who have performed with them over the course of the last 50 years. There are a few other traditional performance groups from Venice, Milan, or other Italian cities that are worth exploring in their traditional intepretations of Italian Baroque as well. It is good to see this performance as still available since Carmirelli's performance is unfortunately becoming exceedingly rare and often absurdedly expensive.