Vivaldi: L'Estro Armonico, Op. 3, Rachel Podger, violin/director

Rachel Podger made it onto the short-list for a Gramophone Award with each of her two previous Vivaldi sets (Opus 4 ‘La Stravaganza’ with Arte dei Suonatori and Opus 9 ‘La cetra’ with Holland Baroque Society). I suspect she may do even better with this set, where she is joined by the members of Brecon Baroque, founded in 2007 as the resident ensemble at her annual Brecon Baroque Festival.

Here is a group of players (eight strings plus harpsichord, organ, theorbo and guitar) entirely at home with one another, exploring and exploiting every musical twist and turn of these joyful, fascinating concertos. There’s no shortage of variety: for a start, the twelve concertos of L’Estro Armonico consist of four each for one violin, two violins and four violins. The music itself is endlessly inventive, and Podger and her ensemble do it full justice with scrupulously clean fast playing, carefully calibrated dynamics (including some stupendously delicate quiet playing), noble rather than abrasive delivery and delightful attention to cross-rhythms.

The exuberant speed of some of the fast movements is exhilarating, but the sheer beauty of some of the slower music is equally astounding. I defy anyone to listen without a tear in the eye to the two violins intertwining in track five of the second disc.

Above all, it is great fun to listen to. If you buy only one recording this spring, make it this one!

About the ensemble

Brecon Baroque was founded in 2007 by Podger as resident ensemble at her annual Brecon Baroque Festival, and specialises in the music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries, often performing one-to-a-part, in a line-up modelled on the Café Zimmermann ensemble Bach himself directed, alongside appearances as a small baroque orchestra for Vivaldi, Telemann, Purcell and Handel.

L’Estro Armonico itself is one of the genuinely pivotal publications in the whole concerto repertoire, first printed in Amsterdam in 1711, and described by the Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot as perhaps the single most influential collection of instrumental music to appear anywhere in the eighteenth century. J.S. Bach thought highly enough of it to transcribe six of its twelve concertos for other forces, reworking three for solo keyboard, two for solo organ, and the tenth, originally for four violins, into his own Concerto for Four Harpsichords. Vivaldi’s clear, driving ritornello structures in this set effectively supplied the template later composers, Bach very much included, built the mature concerto form on top of, which is a large part of why a complete recording of the whole set is a genuinely significant undertaking rather than just another Vivaldi disc.