Tartini: Violin Concerto in A minor D115 (Lunardo Venier)

Nicola Benedetti’s debut album on the Decca label is her first recording of baroque violin repertoire Recorded in Edinburgh, the album celebrates Nicola Benedetti’s Scottish-Italian heritage as she plays virtuoso Italian masterpieces, accompanied by the leading chamber orchestra of her native country.

The album highlights baroque favourites including Summer from Vivaldi’s ever-popular Four Seasons and Tartini’s famous Devil’s Trill sonata, for which Nicola is joined by a hand-picked chamber ensemble.

The generous selection ranges from the sparkling virtuosity of the opening Vivaldi Concerto Grosso Mogul, to the poignant lament of the Veracini Largo and the lyrical beauty of the two arrangements of Vivaldi vocal works, including the haunting Nulla in mundo pax sincera.

The orchestra is directed from the harpsichord by leading baroque specialist Christian Curnyn.

Born in 1692, in what today is Slovenia, Giuseppe Tartini originally studied law before turning his hand to composition and the violin. Having returned to Padua from Prague, where he spent three years immersed in the musical world of the Hapsburgs, he went on to establish a music school and write treatises on subjects such as the principles of harmony.

Today Tartini is regarded as one of the most important composers of his generation.

The Italian wrote over 130 concertos, six of which form the subject of this engaging release.

Written for violin and orchestra and containing many moments of technical difficulty, the works nevertheless avoid descending into overt chromaticism, and this conforms to the composer’s belief that music should sound as natural as possible. His concertos are anything but bland, however: Tartini manages to sustain our interest through traits such

as arresting themes – bold musical motifs that catch the listener’s ear – as well as varying textures within movements. Some movements include short quotations of text in the form of epigraphs, and in these one can hear the playing out of an operatic scena.

From the fast movements’ folk-imbued virtuosity to the arresting poignance of the slow movements, these concertos teem with invention, revealing Tartini’s deftness as an instrumental composer. They are performed by the Interpreti Veneziani, a group whose fine readings document an important facet of the late-Baroque violin repertoire.

Booklet notes by Baroque music authority Brian Clark.

Virtuoso music of popular appeal.

Dynamic’s Tartini cycle continues with no fewer than ten concertos performed on period instruments. The works, which belong to Tartini’s last creative period (circa 1750-70), are characterised by their high musical value and are practically unknown to the public at large. Eight of the ten concertos are world première recordings for which there are no extant modern editions; Giovanni Guglielmo and ’L’Arte dell’Arco’ perform them on their own editions, based on autograph manuscripts and on other existing contemporary copies. As always, the result is extraordinary: philological purity and inventive dash are blended in a series of readings which recreate as never before the authentic spirit of Tartini’s creative world. The recording was made using the 24-bit / 96Khz digital system.

The 18th century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the 18th century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.