Vivaldi
Violin Concertos RV 211, RV 257, RV 386
Andante from RV 583
Geminiani
Concerto grosso La Folia
(after Corelli’s Violin Sonata, Op.5, No. 12)
Benedetti Baroque Orchestra
Nicola Benedetti Violin and Director
DECCA 485 1891
Full Price
The Review
There is a good selection of violinists from Benedetti’s generation who have carried off the shift part time from modern string tradition to period instruments, perhaps Isabelle Faust and Alina Ibragimova principally among them.
Usually it takes years of careful restudy, not because the technique is particularly more difficult but because the manner of playing is much freer before the 1820s, when music became much more dependent on the precise notation of the composer. Those brought up in the gramophone era of Germanic veneration for exactitude find it hard to let go of its rigidity.
Violinists who specialise in the Baroque period, like Enrico Onofri, Rachel Podger and Dmitri Sinkovsky are used to flying by the seat of their bow, throwing themselves around the music with the sort of decorative flourishes that we know characterised the playing of Corelli and Vivaldi themselves. It can be tastefully done but it involves orchestra and soloist having the sort of relationship that a jazz ensemble has, able to respond to each other’s flights of fancy within a tight but intuitive framework.
Nicola Benedetti is a wonderful player, as inspiring as she is brave. I found her recent recording of the Elgar Concerto one of the finest ever made. Even she, though, admits that jumping into period technique Vivaldi was an education. She has her usual sweetness of tone and intense musicality but she sounds stuck to the page. It cannot have helped that she was recording the disc on only a couple of days in the middle of the COVID winter, when her orchestra was spread out around the hall to meet pandemic regulations; nor that there was no opportunity to perform the concertos much (if at all) in public prior to recording and so build the rapport that can only come from having it securely in the bones.
That said, there is nothing wrong with the playing. It just falls short of the highest standards of Vivaldi interpretation that we have become used to this century. Benedetti is to be applauded for the experiment. She just needs a season or two of live outings and free expression before she can truly catch up with her fellow soloists who have been immersed in this style for much longer.
SM