Vivaldi composed over five hundred concertos, a fact that invites the obvious joke — and Stravinsky made it — while obscuring the genuine mystery: how many of them are actually, quietly, extraordinary? Gli Incogniti and their violinist-director Amandine Beyer have spent the better part of a decade making the case that the answer is more than we think, and this new disc pushes that argument into some genuinely uncharted territory.
The program is carefully engineered. Eight concertos, paired by instrument — two for violin, two for cello, two for traverso, two for violin with organ — and at least two of them receiving their first recordings. That’s not a trivial claim in a catalog this thoroughly excavated. And what Gli Incogniti brings to the project is a sound that’s immediately recognizable: small, flexible, transparent in texture, with a continuo section that shifts character from concerto to concerto. Organ here, theorbo there, guitar or harpsichord somewhere else. The effect is less like a period-instrument band performing Vivaldi than like a shifting consort of friends, gathered in some Venetian palazzo, rearranging themselves around whoever happens to be playing the solo.
Beyer opens the disc — the concerto for violin and organ — and the slow movement stops you cold. It’s a duo for violin and organ alone, unaccompanied, the other instruments simply absent. The organ part had to be reconstructed, which is the kind of scholarly venture that can either illuminate or merely approximate. Here it illuminates. Anna Fontana’s playing is soft and searching, and Beyer’s line above it has that quality she brings at her best: technically precise but somehow emotionally unguarded. The finale snaps things back into focus with characteristic Vivaldian efficiency.
The cello concerto in a minor, RV420, has a finale that anyone who knows the Four Seasons will find unsettling in the best possible way — the energy of “Winter” is there, the same driven, obsessive figuration, though you’d never mistake one for the other. Marco Ceccato plays with real authority, dark-toned and rhythmically decisive without being rigid.
But the revelation of the disc — for me, anyway — is the violin concerto in d minor, RV235. I’ll confess I had not heard it before. One previous disc, apparently, in all the years since Vivaldi’s manuscripts began to surface and be catalogued. Listening to it, that seems like an oversight bordering on negligence. The work has a sustained seriousness, a modal gravity in the outer movements that sets it apart from the more extroverted concertos Vivaldi is known by. Beyer plays it as if she’s known it for years — which, presumably, she has.
Manuel Granatiero handles the two traverso concertos with clean articulation and a tone that’s warm without being soft. The traverso, that ancestor of the modern flute with its oblique embouchure and slightly veiled color, suits Vivaldi’s more intimate writing particularly well.
Gli Incogniti’s Four Seasons — and yes, they’ve recorded it, everyone has — is very good, though I’d still reach first for Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante, whose electric volatility on that music has never been surpassed, to my ear. But on this disc, working in territory that hasn’t been mapped and re-mapped a hundred times, Beyer’s ensemble finds something that feels like genuine discovery rather than polished competition.
Decisive, then: this is one of the more interesting Vivaldi recordings in years.
