Vivaldi: Concerti di Parigi – Plewniak

No solo violin ever gets out of its chair on this disc. Somehow that turns out to be the whole point.

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concertos with a soloist showing off, spinning filigree while the ripieno strings hold the harmonic floor beneath. Strip away the soloist, though, and something else emerges: pure architecture, pure motor energy, the composer thinking in blocks of sound rather than decorative lines. That is what we get in these twelve so-called concerti di Parigi, ripieno concertos without a designated star. The absence turns out to be oddly liberating. Nobody is waiting for the violinist to finish showing off. The music just goes.

The backstory is tangled, and Olivier Fourés’ booklet essay lays it out without pretending to more certainty than the evidence allows. For decades these pieces were assumed to be a gift for the French ambassador in Venice, Jacques-Vincent Languet de Gergy, the same patron who commissioned the serenata La Senna Festeggiante. Fourés now makes a case for a different dedicatee: young Franz Stephan of Lorraine, whom Vivaldi met in Trieste in 1728 during the imperial visit of Charles VI. Franz Stephan was learning the violin but nowhere near ready for a solo part — hence, perhaps, concertos deliberately built without one, so as not to embarrass a future Holy Roman Emperor. Whether or not you buy the theory entirely, it is a good story, and it fits what we hear: music of unusual formal compactness, as if Vivaldi were showing off structure instead of virtuosity.

Stefan Plewniak and the Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal recorded this in the Salle des Croisades at Versailles in 2020, and you can practically feel the stone in the sound: a bright, slightly dry bloom around the strings, footsteps of resonance rather than a wash of it. This is a smallish period band, gut strings, minimal vibrato. Plewniak leads from the violin with a rhythmic sharpness that either exhilarates you or wears you down depending on your tolerance for hard-driven accents. Mostly I found it exhilarating. The unison passages have real snap, attacks that land together within a few milliseconds, the kind of ensemble precision that takes real rehearsal, not just enthusiasm.

Tempos run fast. Sometimes very fast. The outer Allegros of several concertos here approach the tempo territory Fabio Biondi favors with Europa Galante, all whip-crack and glitter. If you prefer your Vivaldi with more weight in the bow, more Concerto Italiano under Rinaldo Alessandrini, say, with its darker color and more spacious phrasing, you may find some of these performances thin, even brusque. There’s a place, midway through the set, where a slow movement goes by so quickly it barely registers as slow. I missed the ache.

But the ensemble discipline is real, and so is the imagination in the continuo realizations: harpsichord and theorbo trading roles, occasional cello solos poking through the texture like a half-remembered aria. Vivaldi, denied his solo violin, compensates constantly: sudden unisons, drone basses, block contrasts between forte and piano that read almost like terraced dynamics out of the French overture tradition, which makes sense given where this music eventually landed. There’s a Rameau-like clarity of gesture in some of the faster movements, a crispness Plewniak’s band seizes on with evident relish.

Recorded sound is close, immediate, a little unforgiving of edge in the upper strings. You hear rosin, you hear the scrape of bow-change. I mean that as praise more than complaint. This is music-making with its sleeves rolled up.

Twelve ripieno concertos in a row is a lot to absorb in one sitting. I’d recommend rationing them, three or four at a time, the way one might a box of good chocolates rather than a meal. Taken that way, this disc offers real pleasure and real scholarship in equal measure, a persuasive piece of detective work turned into persuasive music-making, even when the pacing occasionally outruns the phrasing. Recommended, with the mild caveat that you’ll want Alessandrini or Biondi close at hand for contrast.