Vivaldi Violin Concertos – Carmignola

Somewhere around the fourth concerto on this disc, I found myself thinking about how easy it is to take Vivaldi for granted, a fact of musical life, ubiquitous as weather, endlessly recycled in dentist’s offices and cell phone hold music, until a player like Giuliano Carmignola comes along and reminds you why this music terrified and delighted an entire eighteenth-century continent in the first place.

Carmignola has been doing this for decades now, ever since his period-instrument conversion in the 1990s turned a formerly modern-violin virtuoso into one of the great Vivaldians of our time. Arguably the great Vivaldian, if we’re being honest, the one violinist whose name you can drop into a conversation about the Red Priest without anyone raising an eyebrow. His tone is leaner than it once was, huskier at the bottom, silvery and a little dangerous up top. Age has not smoothed him out. If anything the playing has gotten more athletic, more impulsive, as though he has less patience now for the merely pretty.

Which suits this repertoire, because there is nothing merely pretty going on in these six concertos. RV 281 opens the program in E minor with a ferocity that feels almost symphonic. Dantone and the Accademia Bizantina dig into the ritornellos with real bite, gut strings snapping, harpsichord continuo etched in sharp relief rather than politely backgrounded the way so many modern-instrument Vivaldi recordings still manage it. This is apparently the concerto’s first outing in this particular version, which is itself a small piece of news; scholars have been sorting out the tangled skein of Vivaldi’s manuscript variants for a century now and still turning up surprises. Whatever textual pedigree lies behind it, the piece plays like a masterwork, tense, compact, unwilling to waste a bar.

The slow movements are where Carmignola does his most persuasive work. Listen to the largo of RV 232 in D major: it shifts mood almost measure to measure, tenderness curdling into apprehension and back again, and Carmignola never overplays the theatrics. He lets Vivaldi’s harmonic ambiguity do the emotional labor. Compare this with the more four-square, sunnier readings you get from, say, the older Academy of St Martin in the Fields recordings under Marriner: lovely playing, gorgeous string tone, but essentially decorative. Carmignola and Dantone hear something closer to opera seria in these pages. The E-flat concerto, RV 254, practically demands the comparison outright: its minor-key slow movement, with that startling jagged bass line lurching underneath the solo line, sounds like it wandered in from an aria of betrayal or exile. You half expect a soprano to walk onstage.

Ottavio Dantone deserves enormous credit here. His direction from the harpsichord is crisp without turning brittle, propulsive without sacrificing the little agogic hesitations that give this music its breath. The Accademia Bizantina plays as though its life depends on the next downbeat. There’s a rawness to the ensemble sound, a willingness to let bows dig and articulation snap, that some listeners weaned on the glossier Venice Baroque Orchestra approach might find aggressive. I found it thrilling. The engineering places everything close, almost startlingly close, first-row-center close, with a bass presence that rattles a bit in the chest cavity. One imagines, half-jokingly, that whatever seismic disturbances reportedly interrupted these sessions somehow got absorbed into the interpretation’s nervous energy. It would explain a lot.

Not every track achieves the same white-knuckle intensity. RV 187 in C major, genial and extroverted by nature, sits a bit more comfortably within convention, and Carmignola seems content to let its high spirits run on their own fuel rather than push against them. Fair enough. Not everything in Vivaldi needs to sound like fate knocking. But the finest movements here, and there are several, remind you that this composer, so often dismissed by lazy shorthand as having written the same concerto five hundred times, was in fact one of the most restless dramatic imaginations of his century, a man who thought in scena even when writing for solo violin and strings alone.

File this among the indispensable modern Vivaldi recordings, not a replacement for period-piece landmarks like Il Giardino Armonico’s incendiary early work, but a worthy companion to it, tempered by greater interpretive maturity. Carmignola, deep into his Vivaldi journey now, still has something urgent to say about this music. Long may he keep saying it.