Vivaldi’s productivity was, depending on your tolerance for it, either a wonder of the Baroque world or a standing argument for editorial restraint. He wrote something like five hundred concertos, and the question that haunts any new recording isn’t merely whether the playing is good but whether the music itself rewards yet another visit. With La Cetra — the manuscript collection, not the published op. 9 set of 1727 — that question is genuinely interesting, because this is repertoire that sits just outside the standard Vivaldi canon, and the editorial problems are real.
Both sets of twelve concertos were dedicated to the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI, a serious amateur performer who apparently received the gift with genuine pleasure. Whether he knew the manuscript and published collections shared a concerto is, at this remove, unknowable. What matters now is that the manuscript La Cetra is incomplete — several concertos survive in damaged or partial form — and so any disc must make choices about substitution. L’Arte dell’Arco under Giovanni Guglielmo has made those choices, drawing replacement concertos from elsewhere in Vivaldi’s enormous output. Reasonable. Necessary. But it does mean this disc is partly a construction, which the listener deserves to know clearly.
The substitutions themselves are sensible enough. The concerto in b flat (RV 380) stands in for the damaged RV 360, and the g minor concerto (RV 327) replaces the eighth manuscript concerto. RV 327 is the one to hear — aggressively virtuosic, full of the skittering passagework and high-wire solo writing that gave Vivaldi his reputation across Europe. Federico Guglielmo dispatches it with real authority, his tone clean and his bow arm evidently tireless.
But authority in the fireworks doesn’t fully compensate for what goes wrong elsewhere. In the fast movements, the ensemble playing has a roughness that isn’t the honest, muscular abrasiveness of period-instrument conviction — it’s simply uneven. Tutti sections push past crispness into something that sounds more like haste than energy, and intonation wanders enough to distract. This matters less in the quicker movements, where momentum covers a multitude. In the slow movements, though, where there’s nowhere to hide, it matters considerably more.
Those slow movements are where the disc makes its strongest case. The largo from the concerto in C (RV 171) is genuinely affecting — Vivaldi at his most song-like, the melodic line sustained with warmth and real expressive weight. These moments remind you that Vivaldi’s slow movements were what most impressed his contemporaries; it was his melodic gift, not his mechanical facility, that made the Germans copy him obsessively.
The two concertos for two violins complicate matters further. The solo parts for first violin in both works are missing from the manuscript — a notable lacuna that apparently required reconstruction. Federico Guglielmo and Carlo Lazari share the solo duties, and the results are pleasant enough in the middle movements, which survive intact and are scored for the soloists alone. But the reconstruction question — who did it, on what basis — goes unaddressed in the liner notes. That’s a genuine failure of scholarly responsibility.
Fabrizio Ammetto’s competing recordings of these same concertos are, for what it’s worth, technically superior and better recorded. The sound on this Dynamic disc is serviceable but somewhat airless, robbing the string textures of bloom and warmth that more sympathetic engineering might have provided. L’Arte dell’Arco is a capable ensemble with a strong leader, and in the right repertoire and the right room they can be compelling. Here, the impression is of a project conceived with genuine curiosity but executed with insufficient polish.
Worth hearing for RV 327 alone, and for the largo of RV 171. Beyond that — caveat emptor.
