Concerto Veneziano (2005)

Recent years have brought a steady stream of recordings of Vivaldi concertos beyond the dozen or so famous ones, and it has became clear that his corpus of work remains a land of mostly unexplored riches. Consider the pair of Vivaldi works included on this Concerto veneziano, performed by violinist Giuliano Carmignola and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Neither work sounds remotely like the Four Seasons and the other Vivaldi concertos most people are familiar with. The first movement of the Violin Concerto in E minor, RV 278, ... Read More

Recent years have brought a steady stream of recordings of Vivaldi concertos beyond the dozen or so famous ones, and it has became clear that his corpus of work remains a land of mostly unexplored riches. Consider the pair of Vivaldi works included on this Concerto veneziano, performed by violinist Giuliano Carmignola and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Neither work sounds remotely like the Four Seasons and the other Vivaldi concertos most people are familiar with. The first movement of the Violin Concerto in E minor, RV 278, is the sort of piece Vivaldi's successor Tartini had in mind when he complained in reference to the elder master's music that "a throat isn't the neck of a violin"; it is a wordless but highly evocative little operatic scene, complete with mounting grimness and sudden chromatic shocks. The Concerto for Violin and Strings ("in due cori") in B flat major, RV 583, is a grand work with a highly virtuosic (and scordatura) violin part set against two small orchestras; annotator... Read Less