Intimate and soulful, ensemble brings out the vitality in Venice’s music

February 22, 2011|Harlow Robinson, Globe Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE — For its warmly received Boston debut at Sanders Theatre Saturday, the European chamber ensemble Il Giardino Armonico sent a musical love letter to a city with no shortage of admirers: Venice. Produced by the Boston Early Music Festival, the concert focused on composers of the 17th and 18th centuries, from familiar names like the titan Antonio Vivaldi to lesser-known Venetians such as Dario Castello, Tarquinio Merula, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Baldassare Galuppi.

The mellow acoustics proved ideal for the eight musicians and their intimate repertoire. Besides Giovanni Antonini, who directs the group and plays baroque flute, the ensemble includes two violins (Enrico Onofri and Marco Bianchi), viola (Stefano Barneschi), cello (Paolo Beschi), bass (Giancarlo De Frenza), lute (Luca Pianca), and harpsichord (Riccardo Doni). All play period instruments. Their stylish but casual onstage camaraderie bespeaks a long shared history and common purpose that made their performance an invigorating demonstration of the vitality of the early music movement.

The program opened with four separate pieces presented as a single set. Two sonatas by Castello, both from 1629, framed two short works by Merula, a canzone and a ciaccona. In the ciaccona, the lute intones a repeated walking bass line as the violins engage in a dialogue that sounds almost improvised, punctuated by arresting contrasts in volume and speed.

Antonini joined his colleagues as conductor and soloist in Vivaldi’s Concerto in C major for flautino (recorder), strings, and continuo. Vivaldi gives the soloist barely a second to breathe amidst cascading runs and trills. In Vivaldi’s more lyrical Concerto in C Minor, Antonini showed equal dexterity and artistry on the baroque flute (flauto traverso).

After Galuppi’s pensive Concerto for strings, played with exquisite phrasing and dynamic control, Antonini returned. With a toss of his shaggy hair and a wiggle of his flautino, he launched into the satisfying finale, Vivaldi’s familiar Concerto in C major. Its soulful slow movement, used to brilliant effect by Francois Truffaut in his film “The Wild Child,’’ sounded melancholy and ageless, like Venice itself.

Harlow Robinson can be reached at harlo@mindspring.com.