Ah, the memories! Way back in my college days, I was very proud of my LP collection containing some 1,600 albums, including virtually all of the Philips “Living Baroque” series. One day I had occasion to welcome a couple of houseguests, self-styled “culture aficionados,” and we naturally fell into a tediously predictable game of “who knows more about what.” That’s what sophomores do, after all, and some of us eventually grow out of it. Many others don’t. Not that I felt at that time (or now for that matter) that I was anything terribly special in this department. I simply knew that I had 1,600 albums and that I could identify every damn piece on all of them. Anyway, at some point I asked my guests if they would like to hear something. They asked me if I liked Baroque music (this was when The Four Seasons and the Pachelbel Canon had just burst onto the scene via public radio pledge drives and the like). “Naturally,” I replied, “What would you like to hear?” “How about some Geminiani?” came the suggestion, “He’s simply DIVINE!”
Well, didn’t that just beat all? I had Corelli, Albinoni, Veracini, Vivaldi, Frescobaldi, Locatelli, not to mention Addison, Scarlatti, Fasch, Tartini: by God, I probably could have found Tortellini and Spumoni if I had to, but the great Baroque Repertoire Expansion of the 1980s, largely brought on by the original instrument movement, was just getting started. There was no Geminiani anywhere in my collection, or in my Schwann catalog. I knew it, and they knew it, and they knew that I knew that they knew it. So I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. I bluffed. I took out my “Living Baroque” copy of stuff by Albinoni, put it on the stereo (which thankfully was in another room), and announced: “This is my very favorite Geminiani album!” “Oh yes,” they agreed immediately. “We have this one too and we play it all the time.” “I thought you might,” I replied somewhat smugly. Gotcha!
And what is the moral of this story? Well, there isn’t one really, unless we want to make the generic observation that all Baroque music sounds the same–until you actually listen to it, that is. Here’s a particularly acute case, in which Geminiani turns out to be a sort of Corelli in drag. These marvelous Concerti Grossi take Corelli’s Op. 5 violin sonatas as their starting point, and metamorphose them into something else entirely. Geminiani’s music has more fire and guts, requires a higher level of musical virtuosity, and replaces some of Corelli’s winsome melodic inspiration with an almost devilish sense of fun. Taken by themselves, this is Baroque entertainment of the highest order, but if you feel daring and actually spend some time comparing these works to Corelli’s originals, the result adds an entirely new level of fascination to your listening experience.
Andrew Manze has no peer today in this repertoire, and his performances ideally combine his by now customary near insane technical agility (in the final “Follia” concerto especially) with a welcome freedom of phrasing and lyrical sweep. His acute sensitivity to the idea of the concerto as rhetorical speech, embodying the heroic opposition of the solo voices to those of the crowd, brings these highly contrasted, colorful works vividly to life. Both he and his players put some real danger into the minor key works, Concertos Nos. V and VIII especially, while the sunny melodiousness of the two F major concertos (Nos. IV and X) never dissipates the music’s rhythmic energy. With a delightful bonus in the form of Geminiani’s ornamented version of Corelli’s sonata Op. 5, No. 9, as well as the former’s own Cello Sonata in D minor, this collection practically defines the words “self-recommending.” Throw in stupendous recorded sound and super deluxe packaging containing a history of the first performances (1770) of the original Academy of Ancient Music, and if you don’t buy this you’re either (a) not interested in Baroque music at all, or (b) dead. Being broke is no excuse.
