Il Giardino Armonico—“The Harmonic Garden”—offers a unique kind of musical experience. Because Baroque music has a strong harmonic structure but driving teleological narratives of tonality were a later development, Vivaldi played as if it were Brahms shows up a glaring anachronism. Play Vivaldi like Vivaldi--with oodles of flair and panache—and what you get is not the large-scale harmonic movement of Romanticism but little bursting moments of florid, lush, fragrant, harmonies. A false relation here, a fermata there, a run into a cadence—each gesture with its own color and smell, putting you firmly in the sensory now, without a care for when the ritornello will arrive in the dominant.
Founded in 1985, this all-male, all-Italian group offered Baroque music performance of unparalleled vitality and stylishness, flawless ensemble, and vibrant virtuosity. In a program of Castello, Merula, Legrenzi, and Galuppi, as well as Vivaldi, the seven musicians (2 violins, viola, cello, bass, lute, and harpsichord) showed just how fresh this music could sound. They all play Baroque style; they tune to a modern A; the leader ties his violin to his neck with a long scarf. The string-players breathe together and co-ordinate bow speed and bow pressure as if telepathically, using the upper half of the bow a lot more than one might expect; vibrato is used sparingly and to great effect, especially when slowed down to a wide wobble on long notes; the dynamics ranged from a barely audible ppp to fff, sometimes one right after the after; cadences were ornamented with improvised or semi-improvised fioritura by leader Enrico Onofri and lutist Luca Pianca. Merula’s Ciaccona ended with Pianca playing the ground bass pattern solo, diminuendo, and then quoting a blues break with a similar melodic contour. Laughter and applause began spontaneously in the audience. Oozing style, Il Giardino Armonico’s live renditions are as spotless as their recordings and, if anything, exceed them in directness and excitement.
They were joined by their director Giovanni Antonini as flute/flautino soloist in three Vivaldi concertos (RV 444, 441, and 443), almost a masterclass in concerto performance: pitch-perfect and dramatized with virtuoso pizzazz and gestural freedom throughout all the passagework, runs, and cantilena. It can’t be easy to reconcile this instrument with masculinity: that Antonini imbued his performance with virility does him credit in itself.
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