PLAYING THE HERO

Violinist Boris Begelman’s new recording represents a small fraction of the hundreds of violin concertos Vivaldi wrote during his lifetime – but people miss the point when they assume the composer’s prolific output equates to works of lesser quality, he tells Tom Stewart

‘THE HUGE, SOLOIST- LED CONCERTOS OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND BEYOND ARE ALL THERE IN VIVALDI’S MUSIC’

In 2000, French record label Naïve began work on their Vivaldi Edition, a complete recording of the 450 manuscript works by the composer housed at the National University Library in Turin. Two decades and 65 releases later, although the project is not quite nearing completion (this is planned for 2028, Vivaldi’s 350th anniversary), almost all of the 110 violin concertos in the Turin collection have now been committed to disc. ‘There were only two albums of them left to go when Naïve asked me to record some, so I was lucky not to be faced with too many difficult choices,’ laughs Russian violinist Boris Begelman, who has created the ninth instalment of concertos with periodperformance ensemble Concerto Italiano and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini. ‘They gave me two lists to choose between, but in the end, they let me mix and match. All the music on the disc was new to me, so it was a case of exploring the pieces one by one.’

The disc opens with three late concertos – RV211 in D major, RV365 in B flat major and RV283 in F major – which, as Begelman explains, offer a portrait of a composer moving with the times. ‘They’re big pieces, full of technical and musical variety, and they also show us that, towards the end of his life, Vivaldi was trying out something new.’ By the 1730s, when these concertos were written, there was a growing appetite for music that swapped some of the high Baroque’s introspective complexity and chromaticism for singing melodies, shorter phrases and simpler harmonic schemes that looked ahead to the balance and poise of the early Classical era. ‘The B flat major Concerto in particular is written in this new galant style,’ Begelman continues. ‘There’s a real lightness and bounce to the music.’ That said, it wasn’t really the flashy Venetian violin concerto that proponents of the galant had in their sights, more the fusty counterpoint of their Protestant colleagues to the north.

The ‘smaller’ concertos on the disc, RV194 in C major, RV281 in E minor and RV346 in A major, are reminders that Vivaldi was a practical musician in every sense, often writing music for his students at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, the convent and boarding school where he was appointed maestro di violino in 1703. ‘The C major Concerto is full of fast jumps between the strings, so he obviously intended this as some kind of exercise for a student who needed to practise string-crossings,’ says Begelman. ‘And the beautiful E minor Concerto –E minor is a very special tonality for Vivaldi – has two completely different third movements. Someone who wasn’t so good at playing staccato appears to have asked him to take out some of the more difficult bow strokes, or perhaps that particular student needed to work on a different aspect of their technique, as Vivaldi replaced them with lots of double-stops.’ Whether it was these passages of didactic writing or something else in the composer’s pedagogical arsenal that did it, Vivaldi seems to have turned his students into capable teachers themselves. Perhaps spying an opportunity to cut costs, the Ospedale appears to have discontinued his teaching position in 1709.

Rinaldo Alessandrini, who recorded nine discs in Naïve’s Vivaldi Edition with Concerto Italiano before Begelman joined as its concertmaster in 2017, can also hear the ghosts of individual players in the music. ‘The concertos that remained in manuscript form are often those intended for specific people whose playing influenced the solo part,’ he says. ‘From a technical perspective these are often very complex works, but just as it is in Vivaldi’s operas, the writing is very hierarchical. The attention is on the soloist, and their attention has to be on the storytelling.’ Although Vivaldi was an early pioneer of programmatic writing in his instrumental concertos, Alessandrini is referring to something else. ‘The virtuosity brings the soloist close to the “heroic” character in an opera. Like them, they have to navigate dangerous paths and bring the story to a convincing end. Virtuosity isn’t just about technical skill, however. It’s also reflected in the ability of the soloist to embody the emotional character of the music.’

Boris Begelman records Vivaldi violin concertos with Concerto Italiano, conducted by Rinaldo Alessandrini at the harpsichord (also below)

ALL PHOTOS RIBALTA LUCE STUDIO

There’s no doubt Vivaldi was a prolific composer (the violin concertos in the Turin collection represent less than half of those he is known to have written) but questions have been raised, time and again, over the quality of his work. For Begelman, modern criticism of Vivaldi’s abundant output tends to miss the point. ‘We have to go back to the 18th century and the way composers then lived and worked,’ he says. ‘The idea of a composer was not someone who spent years perfecting a single work. They were artisans – people who created things for a living, and they were expected to keep oncreating. Some of his violin concertos are big pieces he obviously spent a lot of time on; others, less so. But it’s Vivaldi who turned the violin concerto into such an extraordinary genre. The huge, soloistled concertos of the 19th century and beyond are all there in his music.’

Begelman’s instrument is another example of the past prefigured in the present. ‘It’s a brand new Baroque violin by Marco Minnozzi,’ he says. ‘The model is Marco’s own, inspired by Guarneri, and I chose it for the recording because it has such a lyrical, beautiful sound. Marco finished it in 2020, just a few months before we made the disc, so of course it’s changing all the time and there’s still so much potential in the sound. I’ve had my bow for three or four years. It’s by Marco Reoletti, who was a fellow student at the Conservatorio in Palermo before he decided to become a maker.’

Whether old or new, the instruments and bows of Begelman and the Concerto Italiano players did not have it easy during the recording process. ‘We had to switch location at the very last minute due to the pandemic,’ he says. ‘It was in August, and we went from a venue up in the hills to a villa in a town called Lonigo, close to Vicenza. The weather was extremely hot and very humid; we were suffering and so were our instruments, and of course we also had to stay much further apart from each other than we’re used to. It was certainly a challenge – but we did it!’

WORKS Vivaldi Violin Concertos RV194, RV211, RV281, RV283, RV346, RV365

ARTISTS Boris Begelman (vn) Concerto Italiano/Rinaldo Alessandrini RECORDING VENUE Villa San Fermo, Lonigo, Italy RECORDING DATES August 2020

CATALOGUE NO Naïve OP 7258

RELEASE DATE 21 June 2021