I’d heard their director, Masaaki Suzuki, make his UK debut as a guest director of the Academy of Ancient Music in October 2004, and been impressed by the quality of the music making he elicited. Then last December, he and the Bach Collegium Japan figured prominently in BBC Radio 3’s broadcasting of all the works of J.S. Bach, and ably stood comparison with the world’s other leading Bach exponents. I’m now hoping that the positive press comments after the concert mean that I won’t have to wait too long before they make another welcome visit to the UK.

However, to make up for this loss I did have two fruitful encounters, both including vocal music by Vivaldi, thanks to the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music and the Spitalfields Festival.

This year’s Lufthansa Festival explored some of the limits of the baroque, working in experiences of contemporary music and the improvisatory worlds of jazz and world music, and pointing up the ways in which music in the baroque era was both improvisatory and new. But for the closing concert they turned to Vivaldi and his serenata La Senna festiggiante, performed by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Ivor Bolton, with singers Roberta Invernizzi, Barbara Di Castri and Antonio Abete.

One of the puzzles of Vivaldi’s career is why his vocal music was not more successful. His talents as a performer and composer of instrumental music were held in very high regard, and his vocal music is a match for his instrumental writing, yet success as an opera composer eluded him. The operas, serenatas and cantatas that do survive point to real skill, yet I am more used to hearing dramatic instrumental writing and wishing that I could hear one of his operas, than actually hearing the vocal music.

The plot of La Senna festiggiante is more than a little thin, revolving around three allegorical characters in search of lost human happiness, which they find in the river Seine and at the court of Louis XV. The serenata ends in a rich celebration of things French. The suggestion is that it was written to flatter the francophile Cardinal Ottoboni.

Strangely it is the very thinness of the plot that seems to have given Vivaldi the freedom to let his musical imagination run riot. It’s possible to hear the succession of recitatives, arias and ensembles as a rich concerto for three voices and orchestra without worrying too much about the words. There is a cruel saying that "Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times": the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra gave the lie to that by making some "typical" Vivaldi textures sound a fresh and integral part of a compelling piece of musical thought.

I could easily have persuaded myself that the two overtures were by Handel. Some of the writing is deliberately French - notably the recitatives with full string accompaniment, and the grand chaconne that closes the work - yet Vivaldi never falls into the trap of pastiche, and from a great variety of textures, conjures a very convincing piece of pure music, which was ably served by sensitive music-making which managed to be highly expressive, yet to avoid emphasising the details at the expense of the long-range structures.

The Spitalfields Festival is based in one of the most ethnically diverse parts of East London. It manages to weave together a raft of cultural strands reflecting the local area, so that it didn’t feel in the least incongruous to eat a delicious prawn curry in a cafe full of Indians on my way to a concert of baroque music in Wilton’s Music Hall, once built to provide entertainment to workers in East London, and now looking charmingly dilapidated. Here I heard La Serenissima perform another all-Vivaldi programme alternating between sonatas and cantatas, with soprano Emma Dogliani, replacing their regular soprano Mhari Lawson. To my ears, Dogliani was the weak link, singing with more vibrato than is ideal, and an expression which seemed at times to contradict the sentiments of the words (which were being ably reflected by the players).

The first sonata was a rarity, scored for violin, cello and continuo, and ably played by Adrian Chandler and Gareth Deats, who managed by turns to be exciting and lyrical with what felt like a refreshing freedom of ornamentation. The piece doesn’t feel like a typical trio sonata because the tessitura of the two solo instruments is so different and Vivaldi manages to make the two instruments complement each other very effectively. The other two sonatas, from a source surviving in Graz, are problematic in that all that survives is the violin part, so the performances used Adrian Chandler’s reconstruction of the bass part. One awkward corner caught my ear, but the rest of the reconstruction seemed very convincing; I could easily have been persuaded that this was pure Vivaldi.

The three cantatas tell the story of a love affair between Elvira and Fileno. As in La Senna festiggiante, the plots are thin, and not helped by a male lover being sung by a soprano, but I was struck by the expression conjured by Vivaldi’s writing, which gave the music a depth and emotional richness that was not obvious in the words. This was all the greater an achievement on Vivaldi’s part in the first two cantatas, which are simply scored for soprano and continuo.

I’m now hoping that these two concerts might herald an increased interest in Vivaldi’s vocal music.
MARK ARGENT