Monday, 8.17.09, 5:00 am
The Women of Vivaldi
The Turin Vivaldi Edition is now operating for ten years and the beautiful women that look at us from its 36 (of 41) covers are a testament to the virility of the classical music recording industry. I’ve written about the edition and its allure before, and it’s been a while since I’ve last heard frowny complaints about the covers from high-minded classical lovers who thought that the lasses had nothing to do with Vivaldi and were therefore a cheap marketing gimmick. Apart from the fact there is probably nothing cheap or inexpensive about these very carefully and imaginatively prepared Denis Rouvre photographs, I’ve always found that pure visual beauty* very much had a place on the cover of a CD that offered such aural beauty. That beauty—and the instant association of extraordinary quality with the series’ distinctive look—probably has won all baroque lovers, including the sceptical ones, over.
The National University Library of Turin contains Vivaldi’s own archive; more than 450 works. (Safely preserved on microfiche, they are casually allowed to erode away.) More scores, copies, and fragements are found every year all around Europe. The Vivaldi Edition, which started on the op111 label that has since been folded into the naïve label, has been most noted for its opera recordings (Vivaldi boasted of 94, of some four dozen the libretti have been preserved, and of 16 we have the scores), but the edition also records Vivaldi’s oratorios, sacred works, chamber- and instrumental music. The performers are among the new Italian (though also French and German) baroque ensemble elite that has put Italy back on the map as a country of performing groups worth listening to. Concerto Italiano and Il Giardino Armonico are among the most established of this new generation, but the Modo Antiquo- and Zefiro Ensembles, and Accademia Bizantina, too, are miles away from what Philips et al. passed off as “Italian Baroque” in the 70s.
Add to that the French Ensemble Matheus , Jordi Savall’s Le Concert des Nations, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and you have a very fine roster, indeed. Individual reactions to the different conductors—Alfredo Bernardini , Rinaldo Alessandrini, Federico Sarelli, Jean-Chrstophe Spinosi, Givoanni Antonini, and Ottavio Dantone among them—differ, naturally, but the attained average is incredibly high. So it comes as no surprise that Diego Fasolis and I Barrocchisti, who perform a third tranche of violin concertos on volume 40 of the Vivaldi Edition, live up to that standard. Not at all incidentally, “Concerti per violin III – ‘Il Ballo’” is Classical WETA’s CD Pick of this week [Week of August 17, 2009]. For your Vivaldi-violin-concerto-fill beyond the Four Seasons—whether via radio, CD, or download—violinist Duilio M. Galfetti’s virtuosic sparkle makes for a most entertaining choice. And, if you’ve so far resisted the beguiling ladies from Turin, it makes a fine introduction to this series. 
* Incidentally, Rouvre’s working title for this particular series of photographs is “Beauty”.
