Vivaldi wrote his piccolo concertos for a player — or players — at the Pietà in Venice, that extraordinary institution where orphaned and illegitimate girls received the finest musical training in Europe, and where the results were heard by every curious traveler who passed through the city. The piccolo concertos belong to that world: festive, demanding, a little precarious, built on the assumption that whoever picked up the instrument could fly.
Flying is what Jean-Louis Beaumadier does. Effortlessly, it seems — though anyone who has tried to produce a clean, centered tone at the top of the orchestral piccolo’s range knows the truth. The sopranino recorder gets there by physics; the piccolo gets there by will. Beaumadier makes you forget the effort entirely, and that’s not a small achievement.
The four concertos with Jean-Pierre Rampal conducting the Orchestre National de France have a slightly lived-in quality now — warm string sound, prominent vibrato, harpsichord audible but not intrusive, a balance between soloist and orchestra that feels natural rather than engineered. Rampal knew this repertoire from the inside; he’d recorded Vivaldi himself back in the 1960s, and his authority as a flutist gives these sessions a collegial atmosphere you can almost feel. These aren’t museum pieces, but they do carry the style of their era.
What strikes me most is how little that matters. The outer movements snap along with genuine rhythmic energy — the kind that makes you realize Vivaldi’s “mechanical” reputation is mostly nonsense, invented by people who’d heard too many indifferent performances. The slow movements breathe. Beaumadier’s tone in the central Largo of the Concerto in a minor, RV 445, is luminous without being pretty in a cheap way.
Philippe Pierlot joins Beaumadier in the two double concertos, recorded roughly eighteen years later with the Ensemble Instrumental La Follia under Christophe Poiget. The recording opens up considerably — wider stereo, more transparency, a leaner string texture that suits the music’s chamber character well. Vivaldi’s concertos, particularly these piccolo pieces, were always more comfortable in a room than a hall; I’ve heard perfectly convincing performances with nothing more than a string quartet behind the soloist, and these later recordings lean in that direction. Pierlot is an entirely worthy partner. The exchanges between the two piccolos in RV 533 have a playful precision — two voices in close agreement, then briefly diverging, then back.
For comparison, Timothy Hutchins’s old Chandos disc with sopranino recorder is lovely, and Dan Laurin’s disc on BIS with the Bach Collegium Japan — before Masaaki Suzuki’s ensemble became synonymous above all with the cantatas — offers a period-instrument alternative with its own considerable rewards. The recorder brings a purity to these concertos that is genuinely radiant, and I won’t pretend otherwise, even though my instinct is usually to favor the flute family for expressive range. Here the argument is close to even.
But Beaumadier is simply extraordinary. The technical command never becomes mere display; every ornament sounds considered, every phrase has a destination. Rampal’s contribution as director is perhaps less decisive — the music doesn’t require a great deal of orchestral direction — but his presence clearly focused the sessions, and the results feel alive rather than routine.
This is a disc for anyone who thinks they already know these concertos, and a fine introduction for anyone who doesn’t.
