Magdalena Kozena / Deirdre Moynihan

It is not too often I buy compilation CDs (as opposed to recitals). However, as a long-term admirer of Magdalena Kozena I bought a two-CD set of her singing various music from Monteverdi to Ravel, via Czech folk songs. As befits this singer, everything is superb (though I wince a bit a some her singing in French). Over two hours of enjoyment.

When I was in my teens, Schubert's piano and string quartet music had been re-discovered. Mahler and Bruckner were emerging from oblivion. Handel was still considered mainly as the composer of The Messiah, Water Music, Fireworks Music and “Handel's Largo” (as if he only wrote one piece of music with that tempo indication). Antonio Vivaldi was an Italian who wrote The Four Seasons; and that was pretty much all. Vivaldi is now re-emerging as a composer of operas and cantatas, so I snapped up a new Naxos CD where, for 55 minutes, Deirdre Moynihan sings four highly interesting Vivaldi cantatas, with backing provided by the Ensemble Nota Velata (two violins, viola, cello, harpsichord).

The music is three star, but I really cannot take Ms Moynihan as recorded here. Her voice is bright, and recorded near the microphone where she sings at a relentless mezzo-forte. There is no “space” around the voice as recorded here, and after a few minutes it really gets on my nerves. The Ensemble Nota Velata has been warned that, to sound “authentic”, the strings have to eschew all vibrato, so they produce a dry, acidic backing. Senza vibrato may well have been how people played in those far-off days, but there is no need to avert one's gaze from advances in instrumental sound and technique that have occurred since. Violins played senza vibrato simply do not sound as attractive as violin playing warmed by a little vibrato. And if one wants to be historically correct, there was no question back in 1720 or whenever, of recording a concert and then playing it back twenty years or so later in one's own living room. We have, thank goodness, seen off “authentic” boy trebles as substitutes for sopranos. We have seen off sopranos singing with a “white”, vibrato-less sound. We have seen off harpsichords or forte-pianos thunking away at all keyboard music prior to around 1830. Hopefully, soon, the wind of fashion will change again and the acid baroque violin sound will be confined to the corridors of institutes of historical performance studies. On this Vivalidi CD, the band sounds like an econo-band beloved of music financial controllers (the same people who love eight part choruses sung “authentically” by four soloists). Agreed that Vivaldi did not envisage the Vienna Philharmonic as instrumental players for his cantatas. But give me any day something like the Venice Baroque Orchestra that accompanies Magdalena Kozena in many of the eighteenth century pieces in her compilation.