What Next Vivaldi?, in the words of hotshot violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, "invites Vivaldi into a time laboratory, engages him in a dialogue with today's creative voices from Italy, telling him, as if to a time traveller, what today's horizons are..." One always wonders whether Vivaldi would have been interested in such a thing, involving music that he would have thought mad; this said, the project is executed here with more precision than is usual with such things. The contemporary pieces, although this isn't stated ...
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What Next Vivaldi?, in the words of hotshot violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, "invites Vivaldi into a time laboratory, engages him in a dialogue with today's creative voices from Italy, telling him, as if to a time traveller, what today's horizons are..." One always wonders whether Vivaldi would have been interested in such a thing, involving music that he would have thought mad; this said, the project is executed here with more precision than is usual with such things. The contemporary pieces, although this isn't stated as such, all might be called neo-Baroque in one way or another, and they do manage a dialogue of a sort with Vivaldi. Listen to Luca Francesconi's Spiccato il volo, a solo violin piece, for an idea: this is a technically brilliant work, and Kopatchinskaja pairs it to good effect with some of the more extreme Vivaldi concertos, all delivered in rock-'em, sock-'em style by the violinist, with Giovanni Antonini and the historical-instrument group Il Giardino Armonico. This group has...
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