Brescianello
Unlocked – Concertos and Sinfonias etc
La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler
Signum Classics SIGCD767 72:15 mins
Technical acrobatics, jaunty melodies and shifting rhythms. This must be Vivaldi, right? Wrong. The music on this album comes from the Red Priest’s younger – but no less gifted – contemporary, Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello.
In the second volume of their exploration of Brescianello’s 1727 Op. 1 set of sinfonias and violin concertos, La Serenissima and its founding director-conductor Adrian Chandler draw parallels between the two composers. The Adagio of Brescianello’s fourth violin concerto, for example, is clearly influenced by the slow movement of Vivaldi’s E major concerto (‘Spring’) from The Four Seasons – published, like Brescianello’s collection, in Amsterdam two years earlier. But Chandler and La Serenissima also advocate for a reappraisal of the Bologna-born, Venetian-trained composer’s own distinctive compositional style.
Chandler takes the lead in the three violin concertos (numbers four, five and six). His playing is brilliantly skilful, immediate and engaging. The handling of the cadenza at the end of the sixth concerto (one of the first cadenzas to appear in print) is especially impressive. Chandler is partnered in true concertante style by the string players of La Serenessima, who come into their own in the three sinfonias (or ‘sinphonias’) that make up the rest of the set and further reveal Brescianello’s gift for melodic writing. The album is rounded off with a French-style suite and the slow movement from Vivaldi’s RV 366 violin concerto, which the German violinist and composer Johann Georg Pisendel inserted in place of Brescianello’s own Vivaldian adagio in the fourth concerto. John-Pierre Joyce