Amandine Beyer

To say that the concerto was one of Haydn's favourite forms would be a bit much, daft even. The man wrote a good hundred symphonies, dozens of quartets, trios, piano sonatas, fifteen or so masses and as many operas, and oratorios... Currently we know of three violin concertos (others being lost or apocryphal), two cello concertos (others... see above), one horn concerto, one for trumpet (there are no others) and at most about ten concertos for piano. Musically, they are fascinating works, but the level of technical skill they demand runs from moderate to a bit tricky. But the First Cello Concerto is not without its moments of difficulty, such as the rapid high notes in the final movement, and it offers some real fireworks. It should also be noted that most of the concertos were written for Esterházy, specifically for the first soloists in the house orchestra of Konzertmeister Luigi Tomasini and first cellist Joseph Weigl. The orchestral accompaniments offered the soloists some fine backdrops: in particular in the second movement of the Concerto for violin in C Major , with the orchestra's string section accompanying the solo violin with a sort of lute-playing that becomes a kind of serenade à la Don Giovanni. Amandine Beyer takes up the violin for this recording, while Marco Ceccato deals with the cello solo – both members of the Gli Incogniti ensemble ("The Unknowns"), a fluid grouping that plays without a conductor. Their leaderless style means that the musicians all listen to one another: it's a lovely way of making music (and sadly rare in the world of orchestras). © SM/Qobuz

1720: in his famous pamphlet entitled ‘Fashionable Theatre’, the composer Marcello ironized the excesses of the new Venetian opera. This landmark pamphlet was published anonymously as Benedetto Marcello, under the fictional editorship of ‘Aldaviva Licante’ - undoubtedly an anagram of A. Vivaldi – ridiculing the operatic world of the time. It took on singers puffed up with pride, uneducated librettists, composers seeking dramatic effects, in short, everything that the musical world then thought about as original, unusual, new, experimental, shocking, weird, baroque, and, in a word, Italian! Vivaldi was one of Marcello’s favourite targets, continually lampooning the Red Priest and his virtuoso violin escapades. It is precisely these escapades that the violinist Amandine Beyer and the Gli Incogniti ensemble have chosen for their rich repertoire: detuned violin concertos (in the manner of Scordatura), violin ‘in tromba’, that is to say violin in a tone that betrays a scraped sound, not to mention more singular works in which Vivaldi leaves the soloist a freedom that gives real heart to the joy of improvisation. This is what really marks out Amandine Beyer, who performs in accordance with the habits of the composer, giving a clear, historical picture of her treatment of the ornaments. So, for the almost implausible Circus Maximus track, it is as if you were actually there, attending the Carnival of the year 1720! © SM/Qobuz

The Sablé festival, held annually in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in France, has its own recording concern that it uses primarily to expose young early music artists and to support the most interesting of their projects; the Zig-Zag Territoires label provides an outlet for this endeavor. Here is a wholly worthy enterprise: the group Gli Incogniti -- led by the fabulous young violinist Amandine Beyer -- in a program drawn from various works of mysterious late seventeenth-century violinist Nicola Matteis, its title, False Consonances of Melancholy, fashioned after one of his publications, but not limited to its contents. As Matteis is not a household name, some summary of his place in the scheme of things is not out of order here: born in Naples, possibly contemporary to Heinrich von Biber, Matteis was an itinerant musician in Germany before making his way to London about 1670. He rose over time to become one of the principal violinists in England, noted for his facility as an improviser, the excellence of his compositions, and his rather coarse and uncivilized manner. While he had many private students, Matteis never gained any privilege at court and may not have cared to hold one down; his son, also named Nicola Matteis, would do so in Vienna starting in 1700 and enjoyed a far more stable and conventional career pattern. The elder Matteis seems to have died around the time his son left for Vienna and is known to posterity from seven published volumes appearing from between 1676 through 1703, two consisting of songs and one republished in a radically changed version, presumably after Matteis' death, and a scattering of music in manuscript sources. Stylistically, Matteis falls somewhere in between Biber and Locke; while the music bears numerous harmonic eccentricities and a representational slant reminiscent of Biber, it also betrays the influence of English style and texture, particularly in regard to the handling of melody. Like Biber, Italian style is a key component in Matteis' music, but it is of an altogether older manner than the Corellian attitude practiced by Matteis' son, at times hearkening back even to the "bizzarries" of Biagio Marini. Needless to say, to an early music violinist all of these elements are strongly attractive combination, and Beyer makes the most of it, delivering a crisp and confident rendering of Matteis with an attentive and richly sonorous continuo provided by gambist Baldomero Barciela, guitarist/theorbists Ronaldo Lopes and Francesco Romano, and harpsichordist Anna Fontana. It's a long program, consisting of no less than 40 movements' altogether, and this relates to this release's only drawback. Many to most of Matteis' often very short pieces come bundled up into suites, and Gli Incogniti has elected to pick from Matteis' whole instrumental repertoire and add movements from elsewhere into sets that have already established contents. But it's hard to tell what's what, as the Zig Zag Territoires release is only partly forthcoming as to the provenance of the works included. It is not through idle curiosity that the listener would desire to really know what he/she is listening to; while there's nothing wrong with mixing and matching movements, to do so without indicating what comes from where seems a tad irresponsible, or at least short-sighted. Apart from that, Zig Zag Territoires' Nicola Matteis: False Consonances of Melancholy is a wholly enjoyable, well-played excursion through Matteis' music; from the standpoint of sheer playing, its aim is true and it hits the bull's-eye.

Here's one of those discs that throws multiple innovations at the listener, any one of which alone might have made sense but which are a bit overwhelming taken together. You may be puzzled to see four Bach violin concertos listed; what's happening is that two of them, BWV 1052 and BWV 1056, were transcribed from harpsichord concertos on the theory that Bach himself made similar transcriptions in the opposite direction. Tempos are quick, with a nervous, slightly pace-bending energy at odds with the usual tempo stability of Baroque instrumental music. Finally, the "orchestral" passages are taken with one instrument per part, in keeping with an approach more often heard in Bach's choral music (where the chorus consists of single voices) but sometimes mooted for concertos as well. This last decision seems especially debateable in music modeled on the concertos of Vivaldi, which were, on the testimony of none less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, composed to be played by an orchestra of young women. If you grant that the experiment is worth trying, you may still find that it works markedly better in the two actual violin concertos than in the two transcriptions. Despite all of the booklet's claims for the violinistic quality of the melodies of the two harpsichord concertos, the music turns into a shapeless mess here. Violinist Amandine Beyer and the ensemble Gli Incogniti assert the novel approach that the polyphonic element in Bach's concertos ruled over the spectacular soloistic concept of the Italian style, and they reduce the emphasis on the solo part accordingly. It's an odd way to play these pieces, but competently and briskly executed, and the engineering from the new Zig Zag imprint of Harmonia Mundi is sharp. In all, though, anyone considering this disc should sample and compare extensively; the minority of listeners who are thoroughly experiment-minded are most likely to enjoy it.