period performance from music of virtuosoViolinists

Birds, Beasts and Battles: music by Virtuoso Violinists

Georg Muffat (1653-1704)
Sonata no. 2 from Armonico Tributo

Muffat was a musical diplomat. Born in France of Scottish ancestry and trained in both France and Italy, he considered himself a German. In his instrumental works issued during the last two decades of the 17th century he sought to introduce the Germans to French and Italian styles, and prefaced his five published collections with informative multilingual introductions detailing Lully’s and Corelli’s performing practices.
The Armonico Tributo, published in Salzburg in 1682, contains the fruits of his Italian sojourn, as he himself acknowledged:

I learned the Italian manner on the clavier from the world-famous Signor Bernardo (Pasquini) and where I heard, with great pleasure and astonishment, several concertos.... composed by the gifted Signor Arcangelo Corelli, and beautifully performed with the utmost accuracy by a great number of instrumental players. Having observed the considerable variety in these, I composed several of the present works, which were tried over at the house of the aforesaid Signor Arcangelo Corelli (to whom I am deeply indebted for many useful observations touching this style, most graciously communicated to me).

Although entitled sonatas, the pieces in Muffat’s Armonico Tributo, like Corelli’s concerti grossi Op. 6, belong to the early history of the concerto. Scored for five-part strings throughout (2 violins, 2 violas and cello), these works could either be played by single strings alone (in the manner of a trio sonata) or by orchestral forces, in which case Muffat indicated the allocation of music to tutti and solo groups (like Corelli’s concerti grossi) by adding the letters “T” and “S” to the appropriate sections. In their harmonic simplicity and clear-cut phrase structure the concluding dance movements suggest French inspiration.

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (c.1623-1680)
Fechtschule (Fencing School)

Schmelzer was one of the most influential instrumental composers working at the Habsburg court during the mid-17th century. As a violinist he was heralded by one contemporary as “the famous and nearly most distinguished violinist in all Europe” (J.J. Müller, Reise-Diarium, 1660). His three main collections of chamber music published between 1659 and 1664 mark him out as the leading Austrian composer of suites and sonatas before Biber. Schmelzer was also a prolific composer of ballet music, which he wrote regularly for the court entertainment’s of Leopold I between 1665 and 1680. As with the present work, most of his dance suites are framed by movements entitled 'aria', between which there is an unpredictable succession of dances and pieces with programmatic titles, here a sarabande, courante, and one entitled “Fechtschule”, in which the posturing swordplay of a fencing master is imitated by the lunging, quivering and parrying of the first violinist’s bow as the player does battle with a fiendish solo part.

Carlo Farina (c1600-c1640)
Capriccio stravagante

We know comparatively little about the life of the Italian violinist and composer Carlo Farina, save that he began his career at the court at Mantua and in 1625 was appointed Konzertmeister at Dresden, where all his surviving music was published between 1626 and 1628. He seems to have stayed in Dresden for just four years before travelling again (to Danzig in 1637); his return to Italy was ill timed it seems, for he almost immediately succumbed to the plague. He is remembered today chiefly as a pioneer of violin technique. At a time when there was little truly idiomatic writing for the instrument, Farina’s imaginative and virtuosic violin writing was genuinely innovative. Many of his pieces, including the present one, have a strongly programmatic flavour and are decked out with explicit performing directions. The Capriccio stravagante, scored for four-part strings and published in his first collection in 1626, is one of Farina’s most colourful virtuoso showpieces. During the course of the work, made up of a kaleidoscopic variety of short movements, the strings (and particularly the first violin) are called upon to imitate the sound of the lira, the little fife, the bowed lira, the trumpet, clarion and drums, hens cackling and cocks crowing, the flute, a soldier’s fife, cats fighting, dogs barking, and finally the strumming of a Spanish guitar.

Antoni Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Violin Concerto “Il Grosso Mogul”

During his lifetime Vivaldi was more generally admired by his contemporaries as a violinist than as a composer. One J.F.A. von Uffenbach, an amateur musician and lawyer from Frankfurt, visited Vivaldi in February 1715 and left a vivid account of his playing:

Towards the end Vivaldi played a solo accompaniment splendidly, appending a fantasy (cadenza) which really terrified me, for such has not been nor ever can be played; he came with his fingers within a mere grass-stalk’s breadth of the bridge, so that the bow had no room - and this on all four strings with imitations and at an incredible speed.

Although Vivaldi’s astonishing virtuosity as a violinist is of course lost to posterity, we are able to glimpse something of his ‘terrifying’ technique due to the fortunate survival of two cadenzas (one lasting over 100 bars) which he wrote for the first and last movements of the present concerto (preserved in two manuscript copies of the work) and which are included in the performance recorded here. Yet despite ranking as one of Vivaldi’s most demanding concertos for the solo violin, it is not simply a virtuoso stunt-piece, possessing sufficient musical substance to have attracted Bach’s attention when, as a young man, he arranged a version of it for solo organ (BWV 594) for the entertainment of Duke Johann Ernst of Weimar. Indeed, the characteristic Italian 'hammerstroke' opening of three repeated notes was later pressed into service at the start of Bach’s own E major violin concerto.

Vivaldi’s concerto actually survives in several different versions, in which the most significant variant is the middle movement. In the autograph manuscript there is a rhapsodic solo for the violin marked “Recitativo” (performed on the present recording), but in the printed edition of the concerto included in Vivaldi’s Op. 7 (first issued by Jeanne Roger of Amsterdam c. 1716-17) a simpler eleven-bar Grave is substituted. The original is not only musically superior, but with the character of a frozen improvisation it is an important reminder of Vivaldi’s spell-binding talent as a virtuoso violinist.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704)
Battalia

The 18th century English music historian, Charles Burney, wrote that “of all the violin players of the last century Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and most fanciful of any music I have seen of the same period” The ensemble sonata “Battalia” is certainly 'fanciful' in its programmatic content, though not as technically difficult as some of Biber’s solo violin sonatas (most famously the “Mystery” sonatas of c. 1676). Written in or around 1673, the “Battalia” sonata is provided with sub-titles throughout, much like the Farina Capriccio stravagante. After a bounding introduction the texture is expanded to nine parts entering successively to give the impression of a back-slapping, lusty sing-song; a little later Mars, God of War, is invoked in a spectacular violin solo (accompanied by a single-note drone on the second violin). After a boozy aria dedicated to Bacchus, a brief battle ensues (depicted by suitable furious string tremolandi), and the whole work is eventually rounded off by a lament for the wounded musketeers.

Simon Heighes (1992)