Vivaldi: Recorder Sonata in G minor, RV 51

This new recording in the ever growing Brilliant Classics Vivaldi discography offers an attractive set of Oboe Sonatas, for solo oboe and basso continuo (in this case a generous and colourful combination of cello, bassoon and harpsichord).

Paolo Pollastri is solo oboist of the famous Orchestra Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (one of Italy’s best and most famous orchestras). On this recording however he plays a Baroque oboe, accompanied by a Baroque ensemble, following the historically based performance practice. Pollastri did his own research collecting the oboe sonatas from various sources, and offers one apocryph sonata, formerly attributed to Chedeville, whose pastoral athmosphere perfectly fits the sweet and slightly melancholy timbre of the baroque oboe.

The latest addition to Brilliant Classics’ ever-growing recorded catalogue of music by the asthmatic ‘Red Priest’ of Venice, Antonio Vivaldi, is of oboe sonatas, played (as are most of the recordings in that catalogue) by an Italian ensemble with full awareness of the latest scholarly research into Vivaldi’s manuscripts and performing styles, and on period instruments, soaked in an appreciation of how most stylishly to realise the music of the Italian Baroque.

The oboist himself, Paolo Pollastri, is oboist with Rome’s Orchestra nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which works with many of the world’s great conductors; he has also contributed fine booklet notes to this release. So both technical and scholarly address are not lacking for this album of sprightly chamber music, which was composed not for the usual crowd of orphaned prodigies at the Ospedale della Pietà, but more likely for travelling virtuosi who made Venice a stop on their itinerary. Consequently the manuscripts for the sonatas here are scattered far and wide, from Cambridge to Dresden. Pollastri also includes an apocryphal work, once attributed to Vivaldi but now ascribed to the Frenchman de Chédeville, for its smooth Francophone style and pastoral idiom.

Though several of Vivaldi’s most delightful concertos are written for the flute, he left relatively little chamber music for the instrument: the ‘Il Pastor Fido’ set which used to be attributed to him is now known to have been composed by Nicolas Chédeville. On this valuable new recording, Mario Folena and Roberto Loreggian offer what seems to be all that is left of Vivaldi’s output for the genre, informed by the latest scholarship and in delightful and lively period-instrument recordings. They couple it not with the previously recorded ‘Il Pastor Fido’ sonatas, but with a genuine rarity: an arrangement of ‘Spring’ from The Four Seasons made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the composer and philosopher who argued that, in politics as in music, Man should return to first principles.

The great popularity that Vivaldi still enjoys today is linked to a great extent to his extraordinary violin concertos but, unlike most Italian violinist-composers of the age (from Corelli to Tartini, from Veracini to Locatelli) he also paid very particular attention to wind instruments. Vivaldi’s taste for wind instruments has a markedly international savour, for his scores accept instruments like the salmoé, the very modern two-key clarinet or again flageolets, instruments akin to the recorder and very popular in France and England.

As well as these, of course, trumpets, horns and the more traditional recorders and flutes, oboes and bassoons, used in every kind of combination, with an attention to orchestral colours and chamber-like intertwining that truly have few equals. The recording focuses on Vivaldi’s chamber music, and, albeit with a relatively limited ensemble, offers a significant profile of the various instrumental forms and combinations adopted by the Venetian composer. The Padua Baroque Ensemble Sans Souci, founded by Giuseppe Nalin in 1986, dedicates itself especially to performing music dating from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. They have recorded 13 CDs, 11 of them with Dynamic.