What Next Vivaldi?, in the words of hotshot violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, "invites Vivaldi into a time laboratory, engages him in a dialogue with today's creative voices from Italy, telling him, as if to a time traveller, what today's horizons are..." One always wonders whether Vivaldi would have been interested in such a thing, involving music that he would have thought mad; this said, the project is executed here with more precision than is usual with such things. The contemporary pieces, although this isn't stated as such, all might be called neo-Baroque in one way or another, and they do manage a dialogue of a sort with Vivaldi. Listen to Luca Francesconi's Spiccato il volo, a solo violin piece, for an idea: this is a technically brilliant work, and Kopatchinskaja pairs it to good effect with some of the more extreme Vivaldi concertos, all delivered in rock-'em, sock-'em style by the violinist, with Giovanni Antonini and the historical-instrument group Il Giardino Armonico. This group has always favored the high-drama approach to Vivaldi, regarding instrumental music as an operatic offshoot best performed with maximum dramatic impact. Kopatchinskaja and Antonini even go beyond other practitioners of this style, and there's no denying the energy of the music here, even with some odd decisions like altered tuning in one of the most extreme concertos of all, the Concerto in D major, RV 208 ("Il grosso Mogul"), in which Bach was interested enough to transcribe the work for organ. Perhaps this is not Vivaldi to everyone's taste, but in all likelihood, it contains something of the urgency that Vivaldi's music had for audiences in its time, and this justifies the idea of dialogue with contemporary creativity.
What's Next Vivaldi?
Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Giovanni Antonini / Il Giardino Armonico
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What's Next Vivaldi? Review
by James Manheim
