La Serenissima, Wigmore Hall review – an Italian menu to savour

For 30 years, La Serenissima have re-mapped the landscape of the Italian Baroque repertoire so that its towering figures, notably Vivaldi, no longer look like isolated peaks but integrated parts of a spectacular range. The ensemble founded by violinist Adrian Chandler delves deep into the archives to recover neglected music not just as a nerdish passion (though there’s nowt wrong with that) but the basis for practical performing editions that restore these lost sounds to life.

At the Wigmore Hall, their “Giro d’Italia” series will span the 18th-century peninsula. It began with a seven-course menu that featured string concertos composed all the way from Brescia down to Palermo, with one Vivaldi favourite on the carta but several little-known dishes too. Anyone for a taste of Pietro Gnocchi?

It may not be trivial to note that most of the featured musicians, born between the 1660s and 1680s, lived well into their seventies or eighties. Careers of musical performance, plus traditional Italian fare from presumably well-stocked ducal or clerical kitchens, evidently did a life-enhancing, and life-stretching, job. And, thanks to La Serenissima’s energetic but always disciplined playing as much as the scores in front of them, a healthy glow of robust enjoyment spread from the Wigmore stage.

At its centre, Robin Bigwood ‘s organ and harpsichord continuo anchored 14 string players, with Chandler as violin soloist in those works that showcased a single voice. Nicely balanced, seamlessly blended, La Serenissima’s rich and rounded sound lets both the courtly and earthy aspects of this repertoire flourish. Here, the aristocratic salon show-stopper never feels more than a few measures away from the vino-fuelled country dance.

Baroque revivalism can bring with it a taste for extreme gestures in tempi, timbres or dynamics. For all their instrumental flair, Chandler’s outfit avoid that sort of grandstanding. Their pulse, momentum and tight togetherness – especially in unison passages – laid reliably solid ground beneath the solo excursions that stud these works. There’s dash, and panache, in abundance here, but never at the expense of these mostly unfamiliar scores.

The sole Venetian stop on our giro featured Vivaldi’s D minor violin concerto, RV235. Something of an exhibition piece, with its acrobatic runs, fiendish passagework and ever-changing bowings, long and short, it not only gave Chandler a chance to dazzle (which he certainly did) but reminded us of the Baroque soundscape we might already know as a benchmark for the evening’s new discoveries. In the first half, devoted to northern Italian works, a sinfonia-suite by Brescianello from Bologna resolves into an extended (maybe over-extended) dance sequence that may bring Bach as much as Vivaldi to mind. However, its undoubted charms almost outstayed their welcome. Not every archive dive returns with a gem. Pieces by the oddball Gnocchi from Brescia (a polymath who published books on geography and history) and Gregori from Lucca confirmed the theatrical, and liturgical, sensibility of the age. The instrumental writing abounds in dramatic coups and flourishes as pregnant pauses yield to crunching tutti or high-wire solo gyrations.

For all these pleasures, nothing on the first, northern, leg of the tour quite dislodged Vivaldi from his perch of pre-eminence. After a break, the southerners posed a rather stiffer challenge. An E flat string concerto from the Rome-based Valentini features a 50-bar solo stretch of broken chords that (as Chandler drily commented in one of engaging introductions) made him want to call the composer not by his usual nickname, “Little Ragamuffin”, but something less affectionate. A star virtuoso himself, Valentini’s vehicle for his own talents was given a nerveless spin by Chandler and his colleagues, with intriguing staccato bursts that edge towards the terrain of Vivaldi’s seasonal scene-painting.

The closing pair of concertos, arguably the pick of the non-Vivaldian bunch, saw deft and complex fugal and contrapuntal writing that permitted La Serenissima’s strings to enrich their colour palette. Facco’s C major concerto offsets bouncing, driving ensemble passages with solo spots that Chandler graced, as often, with sweetness as well as swagger. As for the E minor work by Durante of Naples, the elegiac elegance of its adagio and largo movements – almost Handel-like at times – is balanced by the dense, lavish and brilliant harmonic weave of the pacier sections. Probably a student of Alessandro Scarlatti, Durante composed mostly for church choirs but, on this ravishing evidence, could absolutely shine with strings. This farewell dish (save for a brisk Vivaldi encore) sharpened the appetite for the next stage on La Serenissima’s journey of Italian discovery.

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