Pietro Antonio Locatelli, born in Bergamo in 1695, was trained in Rome and lived from 1729 in Amsterdam. The 24 caprices he included in his Arte del violino have led him to be regarded as a sort of baroque Paganini. His music is distinctly in the line of descent from Corelli, rather than in the Venetian, Vivaldian tradition; in a number of ways, especially their fullness of texture, these Op. 1 Concertos are closer to Geminiani (a pupil of Corelli) than anyone else. Dating from the beginning of the 1720s, they show a fascinating variety of manner: there are a number of fugues (more of a Handelian freedom than a Bachian seriousness), movements that develop a figure or a rhythm, several that exploit string texture (listen to the extraordinarily sensuous writing in the second movement of No. 7, remarkable too for its chromatics, or the third of No. 2), several in a simple melodic style, and a number of dances in the last four concertos, which are of the da camera type – but even in the gigues there are busy inner voices. Locatelli’s textures are never simple; there is always a lot going on in his music. You sense in these concertos a young composer whose mind was positively bursting with ideas – and perhaps didn’t yet have the discrimination always to use them effectively, still less economically. It is very inspiriting music, but also a shade exhausting because of its eventfulness, elaboration and density.
It is clear that the Raglan musicians are enjoying themselves in their two-disc set. They are very conscious of the drive, the drama and the relishing of string sound that are a part of the music, not to mention the brilliance of the solo writing, which Elizabeth Wallfisch despatches with such spirit (for that, try for example the finale of No. 4). They make the most of No. 8, a Christmas piece modelled on Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, with richly sombre sound in the opening pair of movements, vigour in the fugue, and graceful playing in the final pastoral. Here and there they are too ferocious in attack, and the effect is unmusical (the Largo of No. 3, the opening movement of No. 7, the second of No. 12); but usually the amount of energy is pitched about right in the lively rhythmic movements and in the finales, many of which have a special vivacity, sometimes demanding particular brilliance (such as Nos. 3 and 5, or with running basses in No. 6 and rushing scales in No. 9). The recording is bright and vivid; once or twice the continuo instrument, notably the organ in No. 2, is too prominent.
If 12 concertos seem about four times as many as you want, then the Italian disc is worth considering. The English performances are the livelier and on the whole the more idiomatic, but there is some assured and compact playing from Europa Galante, with a rather resonant recording that makes their group, which is only 3.3.2.2.1, sound like a reasonably sizeable band. (Quite how they deploy it in three groups, as they claim the music requires, with a solo group and two levels of tutti, I don’t understand.) Some movements are taken excessively fast (the second of No. 5, for example) and here too there is some over-energetic attack (the forceful staccatos in the fourth movement of the same work sound unnaturally pushed). However, the pleasantly airy playing in some movements, such as the finale of No. 12, is agreeable and more relaxed in manner than the Raglan Players. Their programme also includes a Sinfonia uncertainly ascribed to Locatelli, and not in fact sounding much like him, and also the Pianto d’Arianna, a representation of an operatic scene for the abandoned Ariadne on Naxos, with music portraying her rage and despair, some of it in recitative, with the violin, of course, as the soloist; it ends, apparently, with her death, or at least sleep, rather than her rescue by Bacchus. The recording accentuates the continuo harpsichordist, who I fear would often have been better suppressed.'