Vivaldi The Three Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi – Violin Concertos Giuliano Carmignola (violin); Accademia dell’Annunciata/Riccardo Doni Arcana A550 180:29 mins (3 discs)
The title refers not to Vivaldi’s most famous works but to the three ‘seasons’ – early, middle and late – of his career. Italian violinist Giuliano Carmignola and the Accademia dell’Annunciata journey through 18 solo concertos, tracing the composer’s ever-evolving idiom as he transforms from priest to teacher to virtuoso soloist, opera director and impresario. Sober ‘stile antico’ works, grounded in old-style contrapuntal writing, give way to frothy concertos in the fashionable ‘style gallant’; then there are virtuosic, experimental works in which Vivaldi exploits all the colouristic effects of a great Venetian painter, while elsewhere he embraces the drama and lyricism of opera or anticipates the passion and pathos of the ‘Sturm and Drang’ movement.
Maestro of the Baroque violin, Carmignola combines his meticulous attention to the details of Vivaldi’s phrasing and expressive markings with a sense of interpretative freedom, rhetoric and theatre. He produces an exquisitely refined, cantabile sound from his 1733 Pietro Guarneri violin, on which he seems to sing Vivaldi’s lyrical slow movements, floating their plaintive, wistful, yearning melodies with a silky lightness of touch. When it comes to the more virtuosic movements, Giuliano Carmignola’s technique is flawlessly agile yet always at the service of musical expression.
Director-harpsichordist Riccardo Doni draws lyrical playing from his Milan-based period-instrument ensemble, the Accademia dell’Annunciata, and they paint the changing seasons of Vivaldi’s style with multifarious colours and timbres – by turns, luminous, warm, spectral and glassy. Their readings have a classical restraint, characterised more by an understated poise than overt virtuosity.
Kate Bolton-Porciatti