Goldberg - The early music portal
5 Goldberg: *****
The works on this disc span 20 years of Vivaldi's career as an opera composer, from the ouverture of Arsilda (1716) to the sinfonia that opens Griselda (1735). Also included are two of Vivaldi's string sinfonias RV 112 and 137, which the ensemble's director, Stefano Molardi, argues in his scholarly booklet notes were originally the overtures to Orlando finto pazzo and another unknown stage work. Unhelpfully, despite the chronology in Molardi's text, the track list misdates several of the pieces. Molardi' detailed discussion of each, including his insights into Vivaldi' self-borrowings (such as the quotation in Doriall in Tempe from Spring in The Four Seasons), makes up for Divox's editiorial slips.
The performances by I Virtuosi delle Muse, directed by Molardi from the harpsichord, are superb. Most notable are the ensemble's rich but subtly graded palette of colours (to accord with Charles de Brosses' enthusiastic observations after hearing Vivaldi and his orchestra in Venice), rhythmic vitality and atmospheric renditions of the slow movements. This last quality is enhanced by the surprising appearance of the viola d'amore among the strings, which Molardi believes often participated in 17th and 18th century Venetian orchestral ensembles.
The resulting harmonic richness is enhanced by the excellent sound quality of the recording, despite a slightly over-emphatic double-bass. On a good quality surround-sound SACD system, the realism and immediacy of the recording is striking; but, as the booklet's endnote explains, Divox's so-called Aurophonic engineering requires a different speaker configuration from the norm. Shades of the Chaos of Quadrophonic LPs?
Christopher Price