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GRAMOPHONE (01/2016)
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Reviewer: Charlotte Gardner

When it comes to Baroque violin concertos, Vivaldi’s tend to get the lion’s share of the limelight in comparison to those of Leclair and Locatelli, meaning that an obvious draw of this disc is the sheer obscurity of much of its repertoire. The works by Leclair and Locatelli deserve to be better known, especially the latter’s D major Concerto from Op 3 – with its insertion of two show-stopping virtuoso solo capriccios around the standard three full-ensemble movements – and Leclair’s lyrical G minor concerto.

The disc’s solos are split between French-Armenian violinist Chouchanne Siranossian and the orchestra’s director, Rüdiger Lotter, with Siranossian getting the gold in the form of those two concertos. Playing a Joseph and Antonio Gagliano violin, her period style is precise and musical, vibrato employed with restraint, and with a deft lightness of touch capable of working very different kinds of magic depending on the passage. Compare, for instance, the lilting, dance-like gentility she brings to the double-stopped solo opening of the triple-time second movement of Leclair’s G minor work with the gossamer attack with which she delivers the virtuoso bariolage of the Capriccio I of Locatelli’s D major Concerto. In the latter, a slight scratchiness creeps in as the passages rise fiendishly into the instrument’s upper harmonics (tr 16, 3'25"3'32"), but, given that Locatelli himself was described as ‘[bringing] forth great difficulties and [seeking] to astound the listener with his scratchy playing’, it doesn’t feel out of keeping. Meanwhile Lotter, on a copy of a 1741 Guarneri del Gesù made by Stefan Peter Greiner in 1996, is equally enjoyable with his ultra-clean sound, and then achieves an eminently satisfying symbiosis with Siranossian in Vivaldi’s double concerto.

The orchestra itself partners the soloists sympathetically, even while the ensemble attack isn’t always as defined as it could be during fast passagework, for instance in Il pianto d’Arianna (tr 7, 1'03"). Then, the disc’s engineering works both for and against it; recorded at the Bavarian Radio studios, the continuo players are positioned close behind the soloists at the front of the sound picture to create substantial textural colour, but the wider miking of the strings occasionally feels slightly distant by comparison.

 

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