Vivaldi without a soloist feels, at first, like a party without a host. You notice the absence before you notice what’s actually there. And what’s there, it turns out, is considerable.
The ripieno concerto — Vivaldi’s term, or at least one he used — occupies a peculiar corner of his output, crowded out in the catalog and in the concert hall by the seemingly inexhaustible supply of solo works. Nearly fifty of these pieces exist, written across his entire career, and most listeners couldn’t name one. That’s a shame worth correcting, and Arte dei Suonatori makes a persuasive case for correction.
The historical situation is worth a moment’s thought. When Vivaldi was reaching toward this form, he was reaching backward as much as forward — connecting to the concerto grosso tradition of the late seventeenth century, to Corelli and the Roman school, even as he pushed the harmonic vocabulary into territory that would have made Corelli blink. The ripieno concerto isn’t a stripped-down solo concerto. It’s something older and, in its own way, more severe.
Arte dei Suonatori plays with a string sound that’s lean but never pinched, bowing with enough weight to give the bass lines real authority without turning the texture muddy. That matters enormously here. These works live or die by their inner voices.
The concerto in g minor (RV 157) is — well, it’s the one piece on this disc that something like a general Vivaldi audience might seek out, and the ensemble plays its two fast movements with a bristling energy that earns the enthusiasm. The tempos are not extreme; I’ve heard this music pushed faster, and faster isn’t always better. Here the momentum feels organic rather than proved.
Then there’s the Al Santo Sepolcro sonata in e-flat, a piece wrapped in genuine ambiguity. Michael Talbot — who has spent a career untangling Vivaldi’s messier biographical threads — suggests in his notes that Vivaldi may have written these “Holy Sepulchre” pieces less as functional liturgical music than as calling cards, demonstrations of his ability to write in the Viennese oratorio style, calculated to attract commissions from the Habsburg court. Possibly. What’s certain is that the music is grave and inward in a way that cuts against the Vivaldi stereotype, the four-seasons man, the relentless extrovert. Arte dei Suonatori doesn’t oversell the darkness. They let it speak.
The concerto in e minor (RV 134) opens with a chromatic density that feels almost anachronistic — you could be forgiven, in the first thirty seconds, for losing your chronological bearings. The autograph score indicates it served as a sinfonia for some vocal work, though nobody has yet pinned down which one. That unresolved mystery gives the piece a faintly orphaned quality that the interpretation respects rather than glosses over.
The La Senna festeggiante sinfonia is a different beast entirely — outward-facing, celebratory, written for a serenata that flattered French taste and presumably French patrons. The dotted rhythms are there, the galant gestures, the diplomatic calculation. Vivaldi could be many things. One of them was canny.
The concerto madrigalesco in d minor carries its archaic title with a certain self-consciousness — Vivaldi gesturing toward Renaissance polyphony, the white-note severity of the stile antico, though his harmonic language never quite lets him fully inhabit that world. It’s a fascinating hybrid. Arte dei Suonatori plays it without excessive deliberateness, which is the right instinct; the archaism is an element, not the subject.
A disc like this won’t convert anyone who finds Vivaldi’s world too narrow. But it substantially complicates that world, and complication, in this case, is a gift. Strongly recommended.
