Locatelli: il virtuoso, il poeta (Violin Concertos & Concerti Grossi)

Isabelle Faust is determined to disprove the popular theory that all Baroque concertos sound alike. Her fabulous recording of five strikingly different compositions by Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764) shows that she’s set to win the argument. The German violinist, in partnership with conductor Giovanni Antonini and the period-instrument sounds of Il Giardino Armonico, raises creative sparks with two violin concertos and two concerti grossi by one of 18th-century Italy’s greatest violin virtuosos. She caps her program with the delicious “Pastorale” from Locatelli’s Concerto Grosso in F minor Op. 1 No. 8, an affectionate evocation of shepherds keeping watch in the fields at the time of Christ’s Nativity. “One of the goals of this recording is to show that Locatelli has an incredible range of styles,” explains Faust. “The public today doesn’t really know his music. But he deserves to be heard.” Concert promoters, she says, are reluctant to devote a full evening to his works. “That’s why we chose to record pieces that show the many aspects of Locatelli, from those crazy concertos from his Op. 3 L’arte del violin collection to the Concerto Grosso in E-flat major ‘Il Pianto d’Arianna,’ which is highly poetic and incredibly deep. We hope people hear there’s all you could wish for in this remarkable composer.” Locatelli made his name as a musical whiz kid in Rome and progressed to play for kings and princes north of the Alps. He retired from the professional stage in his mid-30s and settled in Amsterdam, where he made a small fortune as an entrepreneur, publishing his own music, importing strings for bowed instruments from Italy and teaching rich amateur musicians. “We only know bits and pieces about his life,” Faust observes. “And there are so many legends, one of which is about him playing so high that he got his little finger stuck in the bridge. Practicing and playing his pieces, you can imagine this really happened!” The violinist-composer, she adds, was hailed by one of his contemporaries for having never played a wrong note and famed for pushing the violin into previously unexplored high-note territory. His compositions are equally uncompromising, littered with hazardous technical hurdles and ear-catching expressive contrasts. “Of course we don’t record music like this just to do a circus number. But you can’t be completely authentic without a little element of that. We tried to make it a nice experience to listen to Locatelli’s music, even his craziest moments. But you can’t take those crazy elements out.” Each of the album’s concertos offers a mix of theatrical display, wild virtuosity, and poetic reflection. The solo violin even substitutes for an opera singer in “Il Pianto d’Arianna,” to give voice to a series of wordless recitatives and arias that project the mythical Ariadne’s lament on being abandoned by her lover, the divine hero Theseus. “In the recording sessions, Giovanni was always searching for yet more beautiful or expressive ways to make this music sing and speak,” Faust recalls. “Each day we’d discuss with him what we could do even more clearly, and how we could carry a bit more of the poetic side of ‘Il Pianto’ into movements from the other concerti grossi. These are all such individual pieces. So it’s not true that this music is all the same, absolutely not.”