Giuliano Carmignola JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Sonatas & Partitas BWV 1001-1006

“Who better to disclose the poetic utterances of these pieces with their highly developed ‘esprit de fantaisie’ than Giuliano Carmignola? I cannot think of any other violinist at the moment who feels this music with such depth and delicacy of expression and who can sustain the melodic line in a manner which mirrors the sustained style of an operatic aria.” (BBC Music Magazine)

Giuliano Carmignola was born in Treviso, where his violinist father discovered and encouraged his son’s passion for music and where the Vivaldi renaissance began 50 years ago. Luigi Ferro, his first teacher at the Venice Conservatory, was a soloist with the Scuola Veneziana Orchestra that Angelo Ephrikian created in 1947 to perform Vivaldi’s music. He later played with the Virtuosi di Roma, with whom Carmignola was in turn to appear as a soloist from 1970 to 1978, while succeeding Ferro as a teacher in Venice. 

Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca / Giuliano Carmignola ANTONIO VIVALDI Le Quattro Stagioni

The fall Schwann catalog lists 77 different versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Concertos. There are probably an equal number no longer available for this super warhorse. Against such tremendous odds, Divox has issued a new version in their new Antiqua series by Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, featuring solo violinist Giuliano Carmignola which sweeps the field. I've no idea how that's possible, but it's happened with this ultra-stylish, superbly virtuoso and magnificently recorded release. Besides the first four Concertos from Vivaldi's Opus 8, one for each season, the disc contains two outstanding additional works of lesser fame: Concerto in F Major, RV 551 for three violins, viola, archlute and continuo; Concerto in D minor, RV 128, for strings and continuo. Through such performance, Italy's Sonatori de la Gioiosa lays a strong claim to the title of the world's top Baroque ensemble. Their energy, poetry, scholarship and flawless virtuosity set a new standard for the entire field. Good grief, the Seasons emerge like a completely new, refreshing experience - and at a time when these Concertos stand near the top of my 'I'm damned if I'll sit through that again list'. They don't so much perform Vivaldi as resurrect him. Maybe there is some truth to the importance of blood lines. All these youthful musicians hail from the Veneto, home country to the composer's family. They capture the grand, cultivated wit of the area to a T, along with much of the regal tastefulness. Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca («Sounders of the Merry Mark») hail from Treviso, an artistic center just north of Venice. They play on original instruments of the period, but with astounding security and natural ease. Ensemble and intonation are flawless, tempos beautifully vital - brisk in fast movements, meltingly moving in the slow ones. Their suppleness of refinements matches angel choirs in an almost superhuman way. And - and they play with no hint of whimpering sentimentality or false showmanship! The emotional depth the Sonatori musicians bring to the Winter Concertos, with its bleak landscape, and the profundity of the D Minor Concerto for Strings is unparalleled in my Vivaldi experience. Similarly, the sunny spirit of the Spring Concerto and the folksy dance quality of the Autumn Concerto make it difficult to sit still while listening. Divox's terrific 20bit technology only adds to the glory of the release. One of the 10 greatest recordings of the Century, you've got to get this. Forget all other versions, no matter how much they've pleased in the past. (Intune Magazine)

Amandine Beyer / Giuliano Carmignola / Gli Incogniti ANTONIO VIVALDI Concerti per Due Violini

Playing and recording Vivaldi’s concertos for two violins, I came to realise how much deeper my love for this repertory and this composer becomes with each new experience. 

Beyond the notes and the formal stereotype, Vivaldi seems to me to be a composer endowed with humanity and a profound sense of the harmony of beings with nature. Whether he is composing for orchestra, for voice, for different solo instruments or, as here, for two violins, he always takes care to bring out the beauty of colours (of both timbres and harmonies), the wealth of combinations, and the versatility of the instruments which he puts through infinite transformations. 

Here, in the interplay between the two violins and their partners in the orchestra, we witness all kinds of metamorphoses, and it’s a pleasure that I find hard to explain in words. The pleasure of dialoguing with Giuliano Carmignola, the enchanter who can give each note a diamantine reflection and each rhythm an infinite, joyous suppleness; the pleasure of turning into a bird into a bird that plays with others in its flock or sings in echo, of melting into a river like a drop of water tossed by the raging current, of feeling like a blade of grass in the breeze, like a splinter of glass illuminating a fleeting moment, a stone tumbling down a steep slope after its predecessor or a particle of the cascade that shoots forth like the ‘wasserfall’ in Rimbaud’s poem.1 Vivaldi has a gift for letting flowers say their name. And for letting us hear them. (Amandine Beyer)

Carmignola / Gabetta / Lazic BEETHOVEN Triple Concerto

Cello superstar Sol Gabetta teams up with the celebrated musicians Giuliano Carmignola, violin, and Dejan Lazić, piano, to form a formidably talented ensemble for this new all-Beethoven recording. They will be joined by conductor Giovanni Antonini and the Kammerorchester Basel, a team who have great pedigree recording Beethoven’s works to critical acclaim.
The centrepiece of this album is Beethoven’s ‘Triple Concerto’, the Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano in C Major, Op. 56. The choice of the three solo instruments effectively makes this a concerto for piano trio, and it is the only concerto Beethoven ever completed for more than one solo instrument.
The album also includes a number of Beethoven’s most well-known overtures. The famous Coriolan Overture features alongside ‘The Creatures of Prometheus’ and the Egmont overtures.

Giuliano Carmignola / Concerto Köln BACH Violin Concertos

Giuliano Carmignola, we’re informed on the back of this CD’s case, ‘seeks to cast fresh light upon these much-loved masterpieces by imbuing them with all the joyfulness of his Venetian sound’. You could say this is as much a warning as it is a USP: if you like your Bach monumental and solemn, Carmingnola’s folky exuberance and springy bow may feel like too much of his personality foisted on the music. But with an open mind, it’s impossible not to enjoy this disc. It achieves exactly what it proudly sets out to, eagerly assisted by the twinkle-toed Concerto Köln.

It includes the two ubiquitous violin concertos (A minor and E major), the double concerto in D minor (with Carmignola well matched by Mayumi Hirasaki, stepping up from within the ensemble), plus two convincing new reconstructions of concertos which, though probably originally written for violin, survive only in harpsichord concerto versions (the G minor BWV 1056 and D minor BWV 1052). At over 70 minutes of music, it goes a fair way towards justifying its premium price.

If it is the fast movements which show off Carmignola’s pizzazz, he also has plenty of sweetly lyrical qualities to bring in the Largos and Adagios – the merest smidge of vibrato at the ends of long notes, everything else achieved by subtle phrase shaping and that nimble bowing arm. (Kimon Daltas, editor of Classical Music magazine)

Viktoria Mullova / Giuliano Carmignola VIVALDI Concertos for two violins

Thanks to The Four Seasons, the solo violin concerto is the genre with which Vivaldi is associated above all others. And indeed, at nearly 250 works, this species of composition forms the largest single portion of his output, outnumbering his next favourite, the concerto for orchestra, by more than four to one. In historical terms, too, his development of the formal aspects of the solo concerto was his greatest legacy: his model of three movements in the sequence fast-slow-fast still wields influence today, and the so-called "ritornello" structural principle - in which returning orchestral statements of a strongly defined, harmonically stable main theme offer a framework for more free-ranging and lightly scored passages involving the soloist - informed every composer's approach to concerto-writing until well into the 19th century.
Yet Vivaldi's concerto output is considerably more varied than that. Not only did he compose concertos for a wide range of string, wind and brass instruments, he also wrote them for differing numbers of soloists, from none to 13. His first taste of international fame, indeed, came with a set of twelve concertos which offered alongside its four solo concertos equal numbers of concertos for four and two violins. Published in Amsterdam in 1711 under the title L'estro armonico, it achieved great popularity in northern Europe in those early days of the instrumental concerto, making its mark on German composers in particular. The flautist and theorist Johann Joachim Quantz later recalled that "as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi's splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days". Vivaldi also acquired a keen following at the Dresden court, who sent their best violinist Johann Georg Pisendel to Venice to study with him; and in Weimar the young J.S. Bach transcribed for solo keyboard six pieces from the 1711 set, including two of the "double concertos".
Only two further concertos for two violins by Vivaldi were published in his lifetime (one as part of his op. 9 La cetra set in 1727, another printed independently in Amsterdam), but there are a further 24 surviving, most of them in the huge manuscript collection of Vivaldi's works now held in the National Library in Turin. These concertos are rarely performed today, either in concert or on record, but, like much of Vivaldi's unpublished output, contain music that is not only undeserving of its neglect, but offer facets of his creative personality that are not always evident in the works he chose to see into print.
The concertos presented on this disc by Viktoria Mullova and Giuliano Carmignola demonstrate for the most part Vivaldi's usual method of writing for two soloists on similar instruments: rapid interchanges of phrases and melodic fragments which echo, overlap and swap over with each other, alternating with passages of parallel motion, almost invariably euphonious (only the slow movement of RV 523 uses the texture to create expressive dissonances). They thus differ from the Vivaldi-inspired but more polyphonic manner of Bach's well-known Concerto for Two Violins, and show the influence of the dominant texture of the chamber music of the time, the trio sonata, in which two matched instruments would duet over a continuo accompaniment consisting of a bass-line instrument and a chord-playing lute, harpsichord or organ. This similarity appears even more obvious in the slow middle movements of RV 509, 516, 523 and 524, which feature "continuo" instead of orchestral accompaniment, and becomes explicit when it is seen that RV 516 shares both its second movement (with slight differences) and much of the material of its first and third with one of Vivaldi's unpublished trio sonatas (RV 71).
Whether these dialogues be virtuosic (as in the outer movements of RV 511 and 514) or melodious (as in the relaxed first movement of RV 509 or the expressive second movement of RV 514), they almost always give meticulously equal treatment to the two soloists, with neither assuming a dominant role in terms of range, technical difficulty or quantity of material. The effect is of a single character in the solo role, albeit one performing musical feats more complex than those achievable by a single player. In this regard it is easy to imagine them providing performance material for the youthful musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage of whose renowned all-female orchestra Vivaldi had charge as teacher and director for much of his career. Their concerts drew visitors in numbers to the Ospedale's chapel on the Riva degli Schiavoni - to admire the music of course, but also sometimes to search for wives; opportunities to show off the abilities of talented players in solo roles in as democratic a manner as possible must have been welcome. This primarily local use is suggested by the fact that while all of the concertos recorded here can be found in the Turin manuscript, thought to represent Vivaldi's own personal stock of scores, only RV 523 survives in a second contemporary copy.
Occasionally, however, there are breakaways from this two-as-one approach, when one violin will play a snatch of melody while the other accompanies. Such moments are fleeting, but can be all the more striking for that, as in the final movements of RV 524 and, most memorably, RV 516, where a glorious tune emerges from the arrow-like orchestral scales of the ritornelli. Having already pictured a pair of Ospedale inmates sharing the more equal dialogues elsewhere, is it going too far for us to speculate that Vivaldi himself, known as a virtuosic if sometimes unpolished violinist, might have taken one or other of these roles, either advertising his presence as melodic lead or gently supporting a favoured pupil with rock-solid arpeggios?  (Lindsay Kemp)

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart PERGOLESI Stabat Mater - Violin Concerto - Salve Regina in C minor

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi had a tragically short career, living just 26 years, and producing most of his mature works over a period of about five years. This album includes three of the composer's most representative pieces. The most familiar is the 40-minute Stabat mater for soprano, alto, and orchestra, which was the most frequently published composition of the 18th century. This version, featuring soprano Rachel Harnisch and contralto Sara Mingardo, makes a splendid introduction to the work and should be of interest to anyone who loves this poignant music. Both soloists have expressive voices of exceptional purity and intensity, beautifully suited to this alternately serene and wrenching score. Mingardo is particularly striking in the aria, "Fac, ut portem Christi mortem," in which she descends into a baritonal range with startlingly solid, oaken timbre. The cheery, playful tone of the Violin Concerto reveals the composer's versatility and Giuliano Carmignola nails its technical demands with lovely tone and disarming grace. The album includes one of Pergolesi's four settings of Salve regina, with soprano Julia Kleiter. It's a largely somber work, similar in emotional tone to the Stabat mater. In spite of its name, the Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart plays music of all eras, and under Claudio Abbado's leadership it brings just the right fleet agility to this music, which is balanced between the Baroque and Classical eras. The sound of the live performances is clean and well balanced, with a warm ambience. (Stephen Eddins)