Open Web Player
This is a wonderful selection of some of the most dramatic orchestra works of the late Baroque, played with great vigor and passion by original instrument group Il Giardini Armonico under the direction of Giovanni Antonini. The pieces chosen for inclusion lend themselves to the highly expressive style of playing this group favors. Yet what's most suprising and striking is the refinement and delicacy of the violin playing throughout all of this music, and, too, I was extremely impressed with the remarkable balancing and integration of vertical and horizontal elements conductor Antonini achieves.
Certain movements do work better than others; the opening well known selection from Gluck is a stunner. Antonini rightly uses the natural horns as discordant accents, rather than as blatant interruptions, and he has the strings bite into their attacks without pushing things to over-loading. The surging, forward momentum of the massed ensemble recalls the most fiery and propulsive works of Vivaldi - all in all it's superb music-making. And if some of the slower selections in other pieces find the strings managing simultaneously to sound both too cultivated in style and too little cultivated in tone, that is very much the exception. The andante of Wilhelm Friedmann Bach's F minor Concerto finds the lower strings opening the Andante with a stately, haunting beauty of dark, rich string tones, once again calling up Venetian echoes. Enrico Onofri's violin solo playing throughout the many sections of Locatelli's Concerto Grosso makes for captivating listening, he's terrific! The piece itself is something of the odd man out here, the least dramatically flamboyant of the selections, though Locatelli's music for violin certainly covers the gantlet of string writing.
There are a few small disappointments - at least for this listener. The superb back and forth writing highlighting C.P.E. Bach's Presto from his Sinfonia in B minor sounds a bit too raw at times, with a little too much 'If a woodchuck could chuck wood' burring from the lower strings. (However, fans of original instruments may revel.) More problematic is the fluxuating tempo changes of Ottavio Dantone in the opening of the Allegro di molto of the harpsichord Concerto; I've heard the music's tricky keyboard vicissitudes handled much more convincingly in concert. (Dantone can be heard to far greater advantage in a brand new recording of the Bach harpsichord concertos;
Bach: Harpsichord Concertos
)
But these are very minor quibbles, and the real star is the music that gives the title to the Cd, a sensational version of Boccherini's famous sinfonia, "La Casa del diavolo". Conductor Antonini gives his best work in a must hear reading: This is BY FAR the best playing of the Boccherini work I've ever heard, filled with great flair and style. Antonini succeeds in giving the original instrument players there head in intimate playing, while maintaining the music's breadth, unity, and overall focus. Not nearly so common an achievement in such music as people might wish to believe, and the results here are quite stunning!
The album comes with several pages of notes in French, English, and Italian. These include a number of good supportive quotes for a more expressive style of playing, as rightly befits the music on this Cd. The Cd itself is a eye-stopping yellow. The cover, a Picasso, is no frightening memento mori or devil as suits the compositions, but rather a smiling and lively, sunny-dispositioned faun; a figure more inline with the painter's ouerve and general Mediterranean sensibility. The recordings were made in Cremona in 2004.
Readers who still remain less than convinced about the upside to original instruments, (even when used in music made to order for winning converts to their style of playing) might consider instead a recording from this complicated musical period by Bach's sons. Played on modern instruments by Les Violons du Roy, a Canadian ensemble, theirs is not so highly spiced a sound as original instruments, nor are they anything like as supercharged as Il Giardini Armonico, but they're excellent, first class musicians. Plus, all understand Baroque style and are considerate in matters of period playing, going so far as to use period bows in these 18th century works. Their Cd comes with one of the better written booklets I've seen, with fine writing on the composers and how their music fits into this unsettled, neither fish nor fowl time.
Music of Bach's Sons
Top reviews from other countries
Johanna Teutscher
Superb playing by giardino armonico
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2020sergiopiscitello
Ottima registrazione ed esecuzione del giardino armonico
Reviewed in Italy on January 16, 2017