courtesy of Crossover Media
This past November mandolinist Avi Avital released his latest Deutsche Grammophon (DG) album entitled Concertos. Readers with long memories may recall that I first encountered Avital in performance, when he appeared as a guest soloist with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra in March of 2010. More than a decade later, I used this site to write about his DG release Art of the Mandolin, which began with Antonio Vivaldi’s RV 532 concerto for two mandolins in G major.
According to the Wikipedia catalog of Vivaldi’s compositions, RV 532 is one of only three to involve one or more mandolins. RV 425 in C major is for one mandolin and strings. The only other instance is the RV 558 “con molti istromenti” (or, as Peter Schickele would put it, “an awful lot of instruments”), also in C major. Neither of these can be found on the new Concerto album. Instead, the album begins with RV 580, the tenth concerto in the Opus 3 collection L’estro armonico (the harmonic inspiration), originally scored for four solo violins and written in the key of B minor. Through the miracles of overdubbing, Avital performs all four of the solo parts. While I tend to avoid “synthesized” recordings, I have to confess that this made for a fun opening of the entire album.
The second selection on the album is also an arrangement. This time the source is Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1060R, a concerto in C minor for violin and oboe. I have enjoyed this concerto in its original form for quite some time; but Avital reworked the solo parts for mandolin and recorder, changing the key to D minor. This amounted to a coupling of different sonorities as distinctive as those in Bach’s version. (The mandolin never appears in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis!)
The Concertos album includes concertos by two other composers, both from the Classical period: Emanuele Barbella and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. There is also a concerto attributed to Giovanni Paisiello from that same period. Ensemble accompaniment for all of these concertos is provided by Il Giardino Armonico, whose conductor, Giovanni Antonini, also plays the recorder in the Bach arrangement. The accompanying booklet has an essay by Andrew Stewart that leads the attentive listener through the distinctions among all five of the offerings.
For my own part, I just hope I shall have another opportunity to listen to Avital in performance, either as a concerto soloist or as a recitalist.
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