Frank Almond’s life is intertwined with that of his violin, the “Lipin´ski” Strad, an exceptional instrument named for the famed 19th-century Polish violinist Karol Lipin´ski and first owned by legendary 18th-century Italian composer-violinist Giuseppe Tartini, represented on A Violin’s Life, Volume 3 by his Sonata Prima in D, Op. 2, a trio sonata in all but name. The masterful Piano Trio in E flat by 19th-century Swedish virtuosa Amanda Meier connects with the instrument that had passed on to her future father-in-law Engelbert Ro¨ntgen. Another great Nordic composer, Edvard Grieg, opens the album with his great Sonata No. 3 in C minor.

The legend of the Lipin´ski Strad went viral in 2014 when, following a concert, walking towards his car, Frank Almond was tasered by an assailant and the prized instrument was stolen. An FBI pursuit resulted in the recovery of the instrument within weeks. International media ensued on the BBC, NPR, and a feature in Vanity Fair. An award-winning documentary film “Plucked” premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Frank Almond’s critically acclaimed and chart-topping recordings of A Violin’s Life are now a trilogy. The “Lipin´ski” Strad lives on.

Jos Van Immerseel returns to chamber music and the accompaniment of young talents, two absolute priorities for him. In Chouchane Siranossian he has found a worthy partner, as gifted on the modern violin as she is on the Baroque instrument, a pupil of Tibor Varga, then of Zakhar Bron, as well as a disciple of Reinhard Goebel, whose first recording, on the Oehms label, attracted great attention (winning a ‘Diapason Découverte’). Here it is the Baroque violinist who engages in dialogue with the harpsichord of Jos Van Immerseel in a Franco-Italian program juxtaposing the music of the ‘Angel’ Leclair and the ‘Devil’ Locatelli, not forgetting Tartini’s famous ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata . . . Indeed, all this music is ‘devilishly’ difficult to play, but the Franco-Armenian violinist shows perfect mastery of it, combined with great inventiveness.

After devoting an album to sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini, for this anniversary year of the illustrious Paduan virtuoso, Evgeny Sviridov offers us a recording of violin concertos. This is his first collaboration with Millenium Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Leonardo Garcia Alarcon in the framework of CAVEMA in Namur. Most of the concertos selected come from manuscript copies made in eighteenth century Germany, where Tartini’s reputation was very high. Evgeny Sviridov has found in these scores cadenzas and ornaments which are very probably in the hand of Johann Georg Pisendel, the great virtuoso violinist of the Dresden court, a friend (and interpreter) of Johann Sebastian Bach! Following a practice that was becoming increasingly common in Germany at that time, one of the concertos has two horn parts in addition to the strings. Of the 130 or so surviving violin concertos, Evgeny Sviridov has selected five.

After several recordings with Anima Eterna and Jos Van Immerseel, the French violinist Chouchane Siranossian tackles a programme of extremely virtuosic concertos that few Baroque violinists dare to face. Thanks to her technical gifts and to partners ideally suited to this repertory – the Venice Baroque Orchestra and its conductor Andrea Marcon, a specialist in the Italian Baroque style – she takes up the challenge with brio. This album is released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Tartini’s death in 2020. Of special interest is a completely unknown and unpublished concerto in G major, the manuscript of which was recently found by the musicologist Margherita Canale.

2020 offers a good opportunity to take a closer look at Giuseppe Tartini, 250 years after his death. A first-rate virtuoso, he was the violin teacher who most influenced 18th-century style: his pupils, who came to study with him from all over the world, went on to fill the best orchestras in Europe. By crafting melodically and harmonically original language on the violin, he best imitated the human voice by taking inspiration from poetry and its meter and using it as a model for his melodic phrases. Tartini, Corelli’s true descendent, went through various compositional phases by striving to find an absolute and natural style of music, close to the people’s soul. There remain abundant traces of his career in a large collection of letters, second only to Mozart’s correspondence. The general public is perhaps still unaware of the beauty which remains secret: hundreds of his compositions which are yet to be brought to light. This re-release publication accompanies the beginning of an Opera Omnia edition published by Barenreiter beginning in 2020: it is hoped that it may outline the illuminating profile of a great musician of the eighteenth century.

REVIEW:

Enrico Gatti has consulted various sources for the recording of these sonatas. He states that in the case of the slow movements there are no versions with ornaments by Tartini himself. He adds ornaments of his own, but does so in different ways in the two sets of sonatas. In the Op 1 he is more generous in this department than in the Op 2 sonatas, where - as he writes in his liner-notes - Tartini inserted many ornaments in the melodic line. This is an indication of the careful and thought-out approach to the interpretation of these sonatas. Gatti avoids spectacular effects - although certainly not eschewing virtuosity, for instance in his ornamentation - and rather emphasizes the intimate and poetic features of Tartini's music. Therefore this set is of great importance with regard to interpretation of Tartini's sonatas. The reissue of this set of discs is most welcome, and nobody interested in Tartini should miss it. Gatti was a pioneer of historical performance practice in Italy, which in the course of time has become mainstream there as it has north of the Alps. This set of discs is also a tribute to his art and his activities in the revival of baroque music. Here he receives substantial support from two other prominent representatives of the Italian early music scene.

– MusicWeb International

The programme of this triple album features 31 sonatas for solo violin that Giuseppe Tartini presumably wrote between 1745 and 1750 and are kept today in the archive of the Veneranda Arca del Santo in Padua. This collection contains the autograph manuscripts of these works that the composer kept editing throughout his lifetime, as the many marginal additions and corrections attest. However, many of these sonatas have come down to us also through other contemporary manuscript copies, which often differ substantially from the autographs, thus making it futile to look for a “final” or “correct” version. Quoting Giuseppe Tartini’s own words “in these small violin sonatas […] the bass is a formality; indeed, I play them without bass, which is the way I really intended them.” Although the first fifteen sonatas have a bass part, undoubtedly written for those who wished to perform them that way, the rest do not, this being a tangible proof that the continuo practice was being abandoned and the bass was no longer being included, not even as “a formality.” Further indications in Tartini’s manuscript suggest that the movements of a sonata had no predetermined position and could be interchanged with other ones from a work in the same or similar tonality. This flexibility was also extended to the order of movements, thus leaving the performer with freedom of choice. Crtomir Šiškovic, violinist from Trieste of Slovenian origin and a specialist in Tartini’s music, chose, for each sonata where there were alternative movements, those that he deemed best for his interpretation. Just as Tartini would have expected. Together with the previous release - Tartini Sonatas for solo violin, Vol. 1, published in 2012 – we are proud to have completed recording the cycle of Tartini’s solo violin sonatas in the year of the 250th anniversary of Tartini’s death.

Although Giuseppe Tartini was taught the first rudiments of music at the College of the Padri dell Scuole Pie in Capodistria, and may have received lessons in counterpoint from the Franciscan Bohuslav Cernohorsky in Assisi, many elements give the impression that the boy had an education that was anything but ‘academic,’ and that the future ‘maestro delle nazioni’ largely taught himself. However, there does exist a declared model for the music of Tartini, at least for a certain period: that of Corelli. His output seems dominated initially by the influence of his great predecessor in terms of both language and structure. The reference to folk music in his music is also obvious. Another interesting element in the sonatas presented on this release is the presence of mottoes of varying length placed next to the incipits of certain movements, and often written in a ciphered cuneiform alphabet invented by the composer. These are poetic quotations, mostly drawn from the works of Metastasio, although not all of them have been identified. At the end of this recording is one of Tartini’s very rare vocal pieces, the last composition copied into MS 1888/1. The poem Solitario bosco ombroso, based on a clearly Petrarchan model and on the classical antecedents of Tibullus and Propertius, was published for the first time by the poet Paolo Rolli in London in 1727, in a musical setting by Rolli himself.

Like all the instrumental genres which were destined to last until today, the solo concerto – just like the sonata and the symphony – made its first appearance at the beginning of the XVIII th century in Italy and spread all around Europe to gain universal fame. This 10 album release features a precious and unmissable anthology of Italian violin concertos composed by Vivaldi, Bonporti, Locatelli, Tartini, Lolli, Nardini, Rolla, Viotti and Paganini. Album 1 is dedicated to Antonio Vivaldi, whose solo concertos best expressed his vibrant creativity and brought the genre of violin, strings and basso continuo concertos to fame throughout Europe. The following albums contain music composed by Vivaldi’s followers who aimed at finding their own personal voice.

Some composers such as Locatelli, Tartini and Paganini were destined to become famous all over the world, while some others were perhaps lesser known, but were able to leave their footprint in the musical field thanks to their unique style made of expressive freedom, instrumental vivacity and formal clarity which later defined the iconic Italian style. The last two albums contain music composed by Niccolò Paganini, whose daring and unattainable virtuosity brought this genre to its absolute peak.

REVIEWS:

Despite its Anglicized name, the Genoese Dynamic label specializes above all in disseminating Italian music, mainly opera, but also instrumental music. In recent years the label has released numerous recordings, in some cases complete sets dedicated to concerts by violinists-composers from the Baroque to Romanticism and which as a whole constitute a highly appreciable testimony of the evolution of the genre.

A selection and summary of this gramophonic plethora can be found in this articulated case that contains ten CDs, ten!, with violin concertos by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1678-1749), Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695- 1764), Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770), Antonio Lolli (1725-1802), Pietro Nardini (1722-1793), Alessandro Rolla (1757-1841), Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824) and Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840) in the interpretation of notable virtuosos including Luca Fanfoni, Federico and Giovanni Guglielmo, Carlo Lazari and Franco Mezzena. Particularly interesting are the last two albums, dedicated to Paganini, with four of his concertos, in which Massimo Quarta, a student and follower of Salvatore Accardo, has the opportunity to shine.

-- Ritmo

‘Settecento’ is the style of art, music and architecture that emerged in Italy in the early 18th century, celebrated here by La Serenissima and Adrian Chandler with a collection of works from that era. The works are grouped by the areas of Italy where each composer worked, including the Kingdom of Naples (Scarlatti, Mancini), Republic of Venice (Dall’Abaco, Vandini, Tartini & Vivaldi) and the Papal States / Bologna (Brescianello). The ensemble La Serenissima is recognized as the UK’s leading exponent of the music of 18th-century Venice and connected composers. Uniquely, the group’s entire repertoire is edited from manuscript or contemporary sources. It has become synonymous with virtuosity, dynamism and accessibility, uncovering new repertoire and making it available to all through live performance, recordings and educational initiatives.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Tartini, Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell’Annunciata commemorate one of the great partnerships in the history of eighteenth-century music: the relationship between Tartini and Antonio Vandini, a cellist born in Bologna (cradle of the Italian cello school), active in Padua for fifty years, and the author of the first biography of Tartini, whom he had known since the 1720s. Coupled here for the first time are Tartini’s two cello concertos, probably intended for his friend and colleague, alongside the only surviving concerto by Vandini himself. According to reports of the period, he ‘played in such a way as to make his instrument speak,’ that instrument being the violoncello piccolo practiced by the virtuosos of Padua in the mid-eighteenth century, here played by Mario Brunello. The expressive heart of the concertos is to be found in the beautiful slow movements: in Tartini the long, eloquent melodic arches create a free inner monologue, while the rich ornamentation recalls folk motifs from the Balkan region, which he may have known. In his marvelous Andantino, Vandini gives the cello a gently symmetrical Vivaldian melody that expands in dialogue with the orchestra.

The latest instalment from baroque ensemble La Serenissima. Often compared to Vivaldi, Giuseppe Tartini was a famous virtuoso violinist and highly respected teacher, and is best known for the sonata “Il Trillo del Diavolo” (The Devi’s Trill) which is legendary for both its story and for its fiendish level of technical wizardry.