Amandine Beyer / Giuliano Carmignola / Gli Incogniti ANTONIO VIVALDI Concerti per Due Violini

Playing and recording Vivaldi’s concertos for two violins, I came to realise how much deeper my love for this repertory and this composer becomes with each new experience. 

Beyond the notes and the formal stereotype, Vivaldi seems to me to be a composer endowed with humanity and a profound sense of the harmony of beings with nature. Whether he is composing for orchestra, for voice, for different solo instruments or, as here, for two violins, he always takes care to bring out the beauty of colours (of both timbres and harmonies), the wealth of combinations, and the versatility of the instruments which he puts through infinite transformations. 

Here, in the interplay between the two violins and their partners in the orchestra, we witness all kinds of metamorphoses, and it’s a pleasure that I find hard to explain in words. The pleasure of dialoguing with Giuliano Carmignola, the enchanter who can give each note a diamantine reflection and each rhythm an infinite, joyous suppleness; the pleasure of turning into a bird into a bird that plays with others in its flock or sings in echo, of melting into a river like a drop of water tossed by the raging current, of feeling like a blade of grass in the breeze, like a splinter of glass illuminating a fleeting moment, a stone tumbling down a steep slope after its predecessor or a particle of the cascade that shoots forth like the ‘wasserfall’ in Rimbaud’s poem.1 Vivaldi has a gift for letting flowers say their name. And for letting us hear them. (Amandine Beyer)