L'Orfeo Ensemble - Vivaldi: Rarità per tastiera (2013)

The track list on the back cover of this disc bears an expanded title that explains the contents more fully: Rarità per tastiera "di" e "da" Vivaldi -- Keyboard Rarities "of" and "from" Vivaldi. The disc includes not only examples of Vivaldi's very sparse keyboard output, but also a few odd examples of the transcriptions that sparsity engendered; composers outside Italy, the most prominent being Bach, capitalized on Vivaldi's popularity by transcribing some of his concertos for keyboard. The Bach transcription here is indeed the rarest of his set of Vivaldi adaptations: a version for solo harpsichord of a concerto attributed to Vivaldi in the single Swedish manuscript where it survives. There's also a transcription for organ and orchestra of a Vivaldi violin concerto by Johann Gottfried Walther, a cousin of Bach's; this is very much in the vein of Bach's own organ transcriptions. Oddest of all is a Dutch transcription for carillon of the Violin Concerto in G major, Op. 3/3, RV 310, but unfortunately this is merely played on an organ. As for Vivaldi himself, several of the concertos involved feature the strange combination of violin and organ, and the opening Concerto in F major, RV 584, is for the intricate ensemble of two violins, two organs, two string orchestras, and continuo. This work shows that, for all the talk of sewing-machine rhythms applied to Vivaldi's music, he could be just as exhaustively abstract as Bach; he simply thought in textural terms rather than harmonic ones. Most of the concertos are early works, and it would be hard to claim they were among Vivaldi's finest. But the student or serious Vivaldi enthusiast will find this disc worth his or her time. The big question, raised and explored in detail in the booklet notes by musicologist Michael Talbot, is why Vivaldi keyboard works are so rare in the first place, especially given that the composer wrote concertos for a dizzying variety of other instruments. The reader learns that Charles Burney, the English critic and musical traveler, remarked on the paucity of keyboard music in Italy during this period, and of course Domenico Scarlatti and other Italian keyboardists went abroad to seek their fortunes. But surely the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian "orphanage" that employed Vivaldi and to which the wealthy of Venice shunted away their illegitimate children, had keyboard instruments on which some of Vivaldi's young charges were proficient. The question is interesting for those fascinated by the Red Priest, and this Italian disc offers a good place to start in exploring it. The period-instrument performances by the Orfeo Ensemble of Spoleto, with a variety of violin and keyboard soloists, are enthusiastic, but the sound, the product of a Spoleto parish church, is unpleasantly harsh. ~ James Manheim