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Stories   >   Giuliano Carmignola and the Accademia dell' Annunciata record 'The Three Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi' / BBC Music Magazine

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Giuliano Carmignola and the Accademia dell' Annunciata record 'The Three Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi' / BBC Music Magazine

Posted: October 3, 2023

Born in Treviso, where the Vivaldi renaissance started 50 years ago, Giuliano Carmignola began his violin studies with his father. His first teacher at the Venice Conservatory, Luigi Ferro, was a soloist with the Scuola Veneziana Orchestra (created in 1947 by Angelo Ephrikian to perform Vivaldi’s music) and later played with the Virtuosi di Roma, with whom Carmignola was in turn to appear as a soloist from 1970 to 1978, while succeeding Ferro as a teacher in Venice. Carmignola’s career was launched at the beginning of the 1970s with his successes in national and international competitions. Having attended master classes with Nathan Milstein, Franco Gulli and Henryk Szeryng, he went on to perform the major violin works of the 19th and 20th centuries under conductors of the stature of Claudio Abbado, Eliahu Inbal, Peter Maag and Giuseppe Sinopoli, including giving the Italian premiere of Henri Dutilleux’s Violin Concerto.

As a teacher, Carmignola has been on the staff of the Musikhochschule in Lucerne and the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. His distinctions include the title of Accademico of the Reale Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Giuliano Carmignola plays the “Baillot” Stradivari (1732), presented to him by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna for his artistic achievements and his commitment to that city’s Orchestra Mozart.
 

BBC Music Magazine's Kate Bolton-Porciatti writes….The title refers not to Vivaldi’s most famous works but to the three ‘seasons’ – early, middle and late – of his career. Italian violinist Giuliano Carmignola and the Accademia dell’Annunciata journey through 18 solo concertos, tracing the composer’s ever-evolving idiom as he transforms from priest to teacher to virtuoso soloist, opera director and impresario. Sober ‘stile antico’ works, grounded in old-style contrapuntal writing, give way to frothy concertos in the fashionable ‘style gallant’; then there are virtuosic, experimental works in which Vivaldi exploits all the colouristic effects of a great Venetian painter, while elsewhere he embraces the drama and lyricism of opera or anticipates the passion and pathos of the ‘Sturm and Drang’ movement.

Maestro of the Baroque violin, Carmignola combines his meticulous attention to the details of Vivaldi’s phrasing and expressive markings with a sense of interpretative freedom, rhetoric and theatre. He produces an exquisitely refined, cantabile sound from his 1733 Pietro Guarneri violin, on which he seems to sing Vivaldi’s lyrical slow movements, floating their plaintive, wistful, yearning melodies with a silky lightness of touch. When it comes to the more virtuosic movements, Giuliano Carmignola’s technique is flawlessly agile yet always at the service of musical expression.

Director-harpsichordist Riccardo Doni draws lyrical playing from his Milan-based period-instrument ensemble, the Accademia dell’Annunciata, and they paint the changing seasons of Vivaldi’s style with multifarious colours and timbres – by turns, luminous, warm, spectral and glassy. Their readings have a classical restraint, characterised more by an understated poise than overt virtuosity.
 

Giuliano Carmignola (violin); Accademia dell’Annunciata/Riccardo Doni (Arcana)
 

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