Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Generally Dramatic Music Played with Real Brio, May 2, 2005
I'm not a great fan of original instrument groups, often finding that they are either wan or rough-sounding. I do agree that some performance practice changes that have come into play since the advent of this movement have been to the good, but generally I still prefer orchestral music using modern instruments.
This CD, though, is something special, largely because the group recorded here, Il Giardino Armonico, led by Giovanni Antonini, is so very good. The works contained herein (Amazon hasn't gotten around as of the date of this review of listing the specific pieces) are as follows:
Gluck: 'Dance of the Spectres and Furies' from the ballet 'Don Juan' (1771)
Bach, CPE: Sinfonia Wq 182 No. 5 in B minor for strings and continuo
Locatelli: Concerto Grosso Op. 7, No. 6 'Il pianto d'Arianna' for violin, strings and continuo
Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann: Concerto in F Minor for harpsichord, strings and continuo
Boccherini: Sinfonia Op. 12, No. 4, 'La Casa del Diavolo,' for 2 oboes, 2 horns, strings and continuo (1776)
The Gluck is played with such ferocity that it almost makes one's skin crawl (in a good way, of course!); this is tone-painting long before Romanticism made it the norm, and it is extremely effective. What is interesting -- it helped dictate the contents of this program -- is that the last work here, the Boccherini Sinfonia (subtitled 'La Casa del Diavolo,' ends with a Chaconne based on the Gluck piece. Actually, it is a paraphrase of Gluck's piece with some degree of 'updating' from a distance of only five years. The earlier movements in Boccherini's Sinfonia also contain references to the Gluck. Where Gluck's ballet concludes with a kind of purification, achieved by a serene ending in D major, the Boccherini continues the devilish D minor tsimmis right to the very end. And an exciting performance this is, too.
Locatelli's eight-movement Concerto Grosso, a violin concerto that features soloist Enrico Onofri, portrays the lament of Ariadne, a subject so beloved on Baroque composers. It is not programmatic, but the general tenor is one of longing, frustration, rage and resignation in turn. Onofri is a neat soloist and he is given neat support by the orchestra. The pieces by the two Bach sons are halfway between baroque and galant styles, both pretty dramatic in tone. The Friedmann Bach concerto features harpsichordist Ottavio Dantone.
This is a well-planned program that tends toward the dramatic in tone, certainly in keeping with the overall title of the disc, taken from the Cherubini piece, 'La Casa del Diavolo.' It is in crystal-clear and lifelike sound. The program notes are informative and nicely written by conductor Antonini.
Scott Morrison
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a Revelation, November 25, 2005
Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music had a recording of Boccherini's Diavolo symphonies that I loved, and abused or lost, only to find, to my horror, that it was out of print. In doing searches again to try and find it, I came across this disk and ordered it, even though it only contains a fraction of the pieces from the other one. First off, the sound is nothing short of amazing. Absolutely no noise, amazing dynamic range. Part of what puts people off to earlier music is the lack of dynamics (changes in volume). After a few listenings, I was suspicious that some of these pieces were being romanticized, there is so much dynamism. But as is the case so often with pieces like Mahler 10, the problem is solved in the listening.
The selections on this disc, even the ordering of the pieces, is great throughout. The first piece, by Gluck, sets a kind of brisk and chilly tone, almost haunting that lingers. The pieces by the Bach sons (CPE and WF) are real ear-openers. Historically we would call these pieces Baroque but there is quite a difference between the Handel and Bach Baroque and these pieces, most of which are from the very end, shortly before the Rococco period which marked the end of the Baroque (which was followed by the Classical period). The lumping of everyone from Domenico Scarlatti and J. S. Bach to CPE and Boccherini into one bucket and calling it baroque was a recent classification (20th C) and debate persisted about it. There are so many different styles (as marked, for instance, by J. S. Bach's various suites: Italian, French and English, and of course, the many German styles (Germany was a bunch of states that had just come through one of the most tumultuous periods of Western history: the 30 years war, where the other powers of Europe basically decided to fight each other in the German states for 30 years, often using mercenaries). Listening to this disc will certainly explode the notions of containment that such a large classification implies (though some people are so turned off by harspichord that its presence is enough to warrant a single tag for a 150 year period that encompasses at least 4 countries). (The Classical Period, by contrast, was only 50 years and much more homogeneous, considering the only composers who remain in the standard repertoire are Haydn and Mozart (though a lot people argue that at least half of Beethoven's career belongs there).)
I wish this same group would put out a disc of the Boccherini diavolo symphonies. Buy this, you will not be disappointed!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Exciting Late Baroque Music by Top Original Instruments Group, November 9, 2009
This is a wonderful selection of some of the most dramatic orchestra works of the late Baroque, played with great vigor and passion by original instrument group Il Giardini Armonico under the direction of Giovanni Antonini. The pieces chosen for inclusion lend themselves to the highly expressive style of playing this group favors. Yet what's most suprising and striking is the refinement and delicacy of the violin playing throughout all of this music, and, too, I was extremely impressed with the remarkable balancing and integration of vertical and horizontal elements conductor Antonini achieves.
Certain movements do work better than others; the opening well known selection from Gluck is a stunner. Antonini rightly uses the natural horns as discordant accents, rather than as blatant interruptions, and he has the strings bite into their attacks without pushing things to over-loading. The surging, forward momentum of the massed ensemble recalls the most fiery and propulsive works of Vivaldi - all in all it's superb music-making. And if some of the slower selections in other pieces find the strings managing simultaneously to sound both too cultivated in style and too little cultivated in tone, that is very much the exception. The andante of Wilhelm Friedmann Bach's F minor Concerto finds the lower strings opening the Andante with a stately, haunting beauty of dark, rich string tones, once again calling up Venetian echoes. Enrico Onofri's violin solo playing throughout the many sections of Locatelli's Concerto Grosso makes for captivating listening, he's terrific! The piece itself is something of the odd man out here, the least dramatically flamboyant of the selections, though Locatelli's music for violin certainly covers the gantlet of string writing.
There are a few small disappointments - at least for this listener. The superb back and forth writing highlighting C.P.E. Bach's Presto from his Sinfonia in B minor sounds a bit too raw at times, with a little too much 'If a woodchuck could chuck wood' burring from the lower strings. (However, fans of original instruments may revel.) More problematic is the fluxuating tempo changes of Ottavio Dantone in the opening of the Allegro di molto of the harpsichord Concerto; I've heard the music's tricky keyboard vicissitudes handled much more convincingly in concert.
But these are very minor quibbles, and the real star is the music that gives the title to the Cd, a sensational version of Boccherini's famous sinfonia, "La Casa del diavolo". Conductor Antonini gives his best work in a must hear reading: This is BY FAR the best playing of the Boccherini work I've ever heard, filled with great flair and style. Antonini succeeds in giving the original instrument players there head in intimate playing, while maintaining the music's breadth, unity, and overall focus. Not nearly so common an achievement in such music as people might wish to believe, and the results here are quite stunning!
The album comes with several pages of notes in French, English, and Italian. These include a number of good supportive quotes for a more expressive style of playing, as rightly befits the music on this Cd. The Cd itself is a eye-stopping yellow. The cover, a Picasso, is no frightening memento mori or devil as suits the compositions, but rather a smiling and lively, sunny-dispositioned faun; a figure more inline with the painter's ouerve and general Mediterranean sensibility. The recordings were made in Cremona in 2004.
Readers who still remain less than convinced about the upside to original instruments, (even when used in music made to order for winning converts to their style of playing) might consider instead a recording from this complicated musical period by Bach's sons. Played on modern instruments by Les Violons du Roy, a Canadian ensemble, theirs is not so highly spiced a sound as original instruments, nor are they anything like as supercharged as Il Giardini Armonico, but they're excellent, first class musicians. Plus, all understand Baroque style and are considerate in matters of period playing, going so far as to use period bows in these 18th century works. Their Cd comes with one of the better written booklets I've seen, with fine writing on the composers and how their music fits into this unsettled, neither fish nor fowl time. Music of Bach's Sons
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~ Johann Sebastian Bach
~ Vivaldi
~ Il Giardino Armonico
~ Cecilia Bartoli
~ Antonio Vivaldi
by Il Giardino Armonico 
