University of Virginia Library

MUSIC

I Solisti Veneti: A Delight

By Teri Towe

The revival of interest in
Baroque music, which reached its
zenith in the 1950's, has seen the
formation of a number of small
string orchestras which specialize in
the performance of Barogue and
Rococo concerti and ensemble
music. Undoubtedly the most
famous of these orchestras are the
Italian ones - I Virtuosi di Roma, I
Musici, The Scarlatti Orchestra of
Naples, and I Solisti Veneti, who
played in Cabell Hall Auditorium
the night before last, in the last
concert this season sponsored by
the Tuesday Evening Concert
Series.

Like its Italian counterparts, I
Solisti Veneti is a small ensemble of
virtuoso string instrumentalists
which specializes in the
performance of the music of Italian
Baroque composers. The group's
approach to musical interpretation
might be characterized as
modernistic.

Total Structure

As a general rule, Claudio
Scimone, the conductor of I Solisti
Veneti, in determining his
interpretations avoids both
scrupulous attention to the
conventions of authentic Barogue
performance practice and the
blatant excesses of Romanticism,
thus giving the group's
performances a stark, streamlined
quality, which at its best,
emphasizes the total structure of a
composition rather than the details
or component parts, but which, at
its worst, gives Baroque concerti a
stiff, unyielding, mechanical
quality, a feeling which
undoubtedly prompted one critic
to refer to the "pernicious,
persistent prattle of the Baroque."
However, Scimone's preference for
a streamlined interpretation of the
music played by I Solisti Veneti
does not prevent him from injecting
spirit and humor into the
performances, as the audience who
heard I Solisti Veneti here
understood and appreciated.

Erratic

The concert of Tuesday evening
was erratic in quality; the
performances of the first two
selections - the Sonata a Quatro in
G by Giuseppe Tartini, and the
Concerto a Cinque in D, Op. 9, No.
7, by Tomaso Albinoni - were
precise but uninspired. Both of
these works cried out for the
application of certain principles of
Baroque performance practice, and
it is incomprehensible that, with a
harpsichord on the stage, no
continuo was played in these two
compositions in which the
realization of the figured bass is a
necessity

The dullness of the Albinoni and
Tartini pieces was not entirely the
fault of I Solisti Veneti. A great
deal of Baroque music was written
either as background music or as
music which-gave the performers
both a challenge and pleasure in
playing them. Often interest in
these works cannot be sustained
when they are listened to carefully.
Furthermore, Albinoni had
tendency to wear out motifs, and,
to my mind, he could waste more
time over the same notes spread out
over the same chords that any
composer I have ever heard.

The second half of the concert
opened with the only 20th century
composition on the program,
Silvano Bussotti's Marbres, a
fascinating, free-form, atonal
composition for antiphonally
grouped strings. I Solisti Veneti
brought the work off beautifully
and set the tone for a second half
of the concert that was much
superior to the first.

To dispel the mistaken belief
that the double-bass cannot be an
effective solo instrument, Leonardo
Colonna, the group's double-bass
player, performed the Introduction
and Allegro for Double-Bass.
Strings, and Triangle by the 19th
century Italian double-bass
virtuoso, Domenico Dragonetti. In
this humorous bravura
composition, Colonna succeeded in
coaxing from his ungainly
instrument a dark, rich tone
reminiscent of the cello tone of
Pablo Casals.

Pietro Toso

The printed program was
concluded with a performance of
one of Antonio Vivaldi's finest
works - The Concerto in B Flat for
scordatura violin, two groups of
strings and harpsichord. Pietro Toso
handled the difficult violin solo
very well, particularly in Vivaldi's
own startlingly Kreislerian cadenza
in the last movement. Mr. Scimone
finally availed himself of the
harpsichord on the stage, from
which he conducted, but his
continuo was not continuous and
was disappointingly unimaginative;
however, this failing did little to
mar a spirited and genial
performance of one of Vivaldi's
most splendid concerti.

I Solisti Veneti rewarded the
audience's enthusiasm with three
encores - two movements from
String Sonatas by Rossini and the
Fugue in D by "Gallario
Riccoleno" (an anagram of the
name of the composer, Arcangelo
Corelli), a fugue whose theme, in a
slightly different form, appears in
Handel's Hallelujah in Messiah.

Taken as a whole, the concert,
despite some disappointments, was
a delight, and I hope that the
Tuesday Evening Concert Series
will see fit to invite I Solisti Veneti
back to the University.