La Simphonie Du Marais & Hugo Reyne - Vivaldi: 6 Concertos pour flûte (2013)

French recorder player Hugo Reyne and his small group La Simphonie du Marais have specialized in the music of Rameau and his contemporaries, where a certain amount of quirkiness is not only acceptable but even desirable and intrinsic to the repertory. Here they move over to Vivaldi, where the case is much less clear, but if you're up for something completely different from high-voltage Italian readings or well-balanced Dutch ones, give this a try. Included are six concertos for recorder and orchestra, most of them also known in other versions. The orchestra consists of 11 players (the orchestra of the Ospedale della Pietà for which Vivaldi wrote many of his concertos had several dozen musicians), and the recorder is heard clearly through the tutti passages. Reyne is on the most solid ground with his large collection of period recorders, which he sensitively deploys according to the characteristics of each piece. This is an unusually large group of historical recorders for one album, and the listener will marvel at the variety of their voices, from flute-like to cutting and powerful. It's with the orchestra that things start to get stranger; Reyne abandons the classic terraced dynamics of the usual Baroque concerto in favor of crescendos and other expressive effects. Those are in turn justified by the single most unusual feature of the album: three of the concertos are introduced by short passages (one is about a minute long, the other two less than ten seconds) in which Reyne announces the name of the piece and then plays a little sound effect setting the scene. The concerto La Tempesta di Mare, RV 433, gets its own little storm, to dubious effect. The overall concept is meant to suggest that pictorialism was an important quality of Vivaldi's music even where it isn't as explicit as in The Four Seasons, and that's a reasonable position. Whether it works here, though, is for the individual listener to decide. Despite the lengthy note in the packaging describing the Chabotterie Manor, the album was recorded not there but in a nearby church, and the acoustic is a bit too resonant for this music. ~ James Manheim