Even discounting The Four Seasons (the most recent recording, by Sarah Chang, appeared three weeks ago), the Red Priest of Venice seems omnipresent, with concerto discs, opera exhumations and ever-increasing vocal recitals. Shouldn’t we call a temporary halt?

No, we shouldn’t. Especially if Fabio Biondi is around. Being a jaded listener is impossible when this violinist leads his group Europa Galante. Whatever their Italian Baroque riches, panache is never forced. No one struts, or plays like a librarian. There is warmth and humanity. Textures glow; the 12 musicians play as one.

The repertoire, too, lifts Biondi’s latest Virgin Classics disc clear of any rut. For he has changed his violin for the dusky beauty of the viola d’amore – a 12 or 14-stringed creature of the late 17th and 18th centuries, with no set tuning, held like a violin, its pegbox often decorated at the end by the blindfolded face of a cherub. Vivaldi, a d’amore player himself when required, wrote eight concertos featuring the instrument, and all of them are here.

The recording highlights Biondi’s subtleties of tone and attack, playing a specimen from the early 18th century. Yet even his virtuosity withers next to Vivaldi’s. The man may have written around 500 concertos, but he’s constantly changing textures, formats, instrumental lineups, and emotions. In slow movements, tenderly decorative solos are soothed by simple chords, or brusquely stabbed in the back. Colours swirl as in a kaleidoscope (there’s a dashing example in the first movement of the D major Concerto, RV 392). Hunting horns ride in for RV 97. A lute duets pensively in RV 540.

All the while Vivaldi bends his music to reflect different musical traditions: folk and court dances, bursts of fuguing, with elements fused into compact, secret musical narratives. It’s a quirk of classical music that popularity clusters round works with nicknames. None of these concertos carry tags, though some could easily be attached: “Tallyho”, say, for RV 97, or, for RV 540, “Death in Venice”.

So take heart: in the avalanche of Vivaldi releases, this one is something special.

(Virgin Classics)

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