What Next Vivaldi?, in the words of hotshot violinist
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, "invites
Vivaldi into a time laboratory, engages him in a dialogue with today's creative voices from Italy, telling him, as if to a time traveller, what today's horizons are..." One always wonders whether
Vivaldi would have been interested in such a thing, involving music that he would have thought mad; this said, the project is executed here with more precision than is usual with such things. The contemporary pieces, although this isn't stated as such, all might be called neo-Baroque in one way or another, and they do manage a dialogue of a sort with
Vivaldi. Listen to
Luca Francesconi's Spiccato il volo, a solo violin piece, for an idea: this is a technically brilliant work, and
Kopatchinskaja pairs it to good effect with some of the more extreme
Vivaldi concertos, all delivered in rock-'em, sock-'em style by the violinist, with
Giovanni Antonini and the historical-instrument group
Il Giardino Armonico. This group has always favored the high-drama approach to
Vivaldi, regarding instrumental music as an operatic offshoot best performed with maximum dramatic impact.
Kopatchinskaja and
Antonini even go beyond other practitioners of this style, and there's no denying the energy of the music here, even with some odd decisions like altered tuning in one of the most extreme concertos of all, the Concerto in D major, RV 208 ("Il grosso Mogul"), in which
Bach was interested enough to transcribe the work for organ. Perhaps this is not
Vivaldi to everyone's taste, but in all likelihood, it contains something of the urgency that
Vivaldi's music had for audiences in its time, and this justifies the idea of dialogue with contemporary creativity.