Mariana Sirbu, I Musici - Vivaldi: Concertos for Anna Maria (1998)

The presumptuous manner in which Philips proclaims this disc of Vivaldi ‘Concertos for Anna Maria’ as being a world premiere recording is as careless as it is misleading. All six concertos have been previously recorded, some of them several times over. Even more absurdly, though, four of the six are included on a disc, with Shlomo Mintz and the Israel Chamber Orchestra, bearing virtually the same title as this new release, and claiming with greater justification, world premiere status. I reviewed Mintz’s programme very favourably in the pages of Gramophone, so readers who subsequently acquired it should proceed with caution in considering the present one.
Who was Anna Maria? We don’t know, other than that she was one of Vivaldi’s most talented orphan pupils at the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice. She was clearly a violinist of exceptional talent, and rated sufficiently highly by J. G. Walther to warrant an entry in his celebrated Musicalisches Lexicon (1732). Vivaldi earmarked Anna Maria as soloist for upwards of two dozen of his violin concertos, as well as several more for other instruments at which she was evidently highly proficient.
The soloist in the six concertos assembled here is Mariana Sirbu, I Musici’s regular solo violinist in recent times. She is a fine player with an affectionate feeling for Vivaldi’s poetic idiom. However, the performances overall are not really a match for the altogether more youthful-sounding vitality of Mintz’s musicians. But perhaps the root of the problem with the Philips issue is an acoustical one. The spacious ambient sound of I Musici’s favoured recording location at La Chaux-de-Fonds does not really suit the chamber-music character and dimensions of this music. The bass is too reverberant, but also too assertive. Even so, the disc is enjoyable for Sirbu’s accomplished technique and pleasing tone, and I Musici still has fire in its belly, if only intermittently. A warmer, more intimate acoustic might have made a choice between the two recordings more difficult. As it is, the Mintz version, with its lighter bowing and suppler rhythmic pulse, is the one to go for.