A New Album of Vivaldi’s Two-Violin Sonatas

Cover of the album being discussed, showing the five L’Archicembalo musicians (courtesy of Naxos of America)

A little over a month ago Brilliant Classics released a brand new album of all of the sonatas that Antonio Vivaldi composed for two violins. “Brand new” means that the recording sessions took place, under current pandemic conditions, in September of 2020 and January of 2021, resulting in three CDs of music. In other words this not a collection of performances that has been extracted from the Brilliant Vivaldi Edition, a collection of 66 CDs, which was released in October of 2014. Indeed, on the basis of the track listing I reviewed for this larger collection, it would appear that the sonatas on the third CD, all the sonatas that lack an opus number, were not included in the Vivaldi Edition.

The performances on the new album are by L’Archicembalo, an ensemble of musicians performing on historical instruments. The violinists are Marcello Bianchi and Paola Nervi. Strictly speaking, these are trio sonatas; and the third part is basically the continuo, which is led by cellist Claudio Merlo. The other continuo players are harpsichordist Daniela Demicheli and Matteo Cicchitti on two sizes of violone.

The first two CDs in the collection account for the twelve sonatas of Vivaldi’s Opus 1, as well as two of the sonatas from his Opus 5: the fifth in B-flat major and the sixth in G minor. (Opus 5 is a collection of six sonatas, the first four of which are for solo violin.) All of the sonatas consist of multiple movements with a fair amount of diversity in how those movements are structured. The one exception is the single-movement final concerto in Opus 1, which is the one in which Vivaldi pursues his own approach to variations on the “Folia” theme.

It goes without saying that this is not a collection intended for beginning-to-end listening in a single sitting. Nevertheless, there is considerable diversity in both structure and affect across the full complement of these twenty concertos. Furthermore, listening to these trio sonatas led me to reflect on how unfamiliar I was with this aspect of Vivaldi’s repertoire.

The fact is that I had to resort to searching my database of articles to see if I had encountered any of this music in performance. In turns out that my most recent experience took place in October of 2018 when violinist Daniel Hope prepared a program for San Francisco Performances entitled AIR—A Baroque Journey. That journey included a performance of the “Folia” sonata, which Hope played with fellow violinist Simon Papanas and a continuo of cello (Nicola Mosca), lute (Emanuele Forni), and keyboardist Naoki Kitaya.

While Vivaldi’s take on the “Folia” was definitely an inventive one, I feel that his other nineteen sonatas don’t seem to get much of Rodney Dangerfield’s respect; and I look forward to getting to know those sonatas better through more frequent listening experiences.