Giuseppe TARTINI
Concerto pour violon en sol majeur, D 78
Eduard MELKUS
Capella Academica
August WENZINGER
11-14 février 1966, Studio Wien-Film, Rosenhügel, Wien
Giuseppe Tartini a laissé près de 130 concertos pour violon, et il est souvent difficile de s'y retrouver... Dans la nomenclature actuelle, catalogue Minos Dounias, ce concerto en sol majeur est le D 78 publié vers 1746 dans «3 Violin Concertos, Libro 1 (No.2)».
Quelques très intéressantes précisions sur ce concerto, citées des notes d'Eduard Melkus publiées au verso de la pochette du disque:
"[...]
The violinist of today is strongly attracted to early music. For one thing the technical and tonal challenge is fascinating, as he attempts to revive the ancient technique of playing a short-necked violin with an old-style bow, which has its own interpretative characteristics, and for another thing early music pre-supposes improvisatory ability in the performers, not only in the realization of the accompaniment from the figured bass, but to a far greater degree in the fashioning of the melodic line. There are numerous theoretical examples illustrating the art of ornamentation as practised in earlier times, but it is far less common to discover complete works with all the ornamentation appertaining to them, and to be able to bring them to performance. The source material is often scattered throughout the world, and assembling it requires an immense amount of patient labour. The present recording is a living example of this.
Both Tartini and Nardini were praised especially by their contemporaries for their inspired playing of Adagios, by which is meant principally not the use of particular techniques of dynamics, tone colouration or vibrato, but the art of decorating the simple melodies of slow movements and giving them fresh nuances of meaning. In the works of both composers there are written out examples of how this principle was put into practice — the task was to locate them.
The earliest work in this recording is the Concerto in G major, dating from the middle period of Tartini’s creative career. The library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna possesses a complete set of manuscript orchestral parts of this work, from which it may be concluded that they were used at the concerts given in Prague during 1724 to mark the coronation of the Emperor Charles VI. A noteworthy fact is the careful marking of parts for the first desk artists playing together with the soloist, in comparison with the rest of the parts reserved for the musicians who joined in only the tutti passages. The solo part contains an ornamented version of the slow movement, so only the cadenzas were needed for performance, and these were taken from Tartini’s “Traité des agréments”.[...]"
Ce disque fut enregistré dans des sessions s'étalant du 11 au 14 février 1966, dans le «Studio Wien-Film», Rosenhügel, Wien, avec la «Capella Academica, Wien» (*) et Eduard MELKUS en soliste, le tout sous la direction de August WENZINGER.
[*] Sur l'impulsion de Josef Mertin, Eduard Melkus fonda en 1952, avec Gustav Leonhardt et Karl Scheit, la «Schola Antiqua Wien», qui devint en 1965 la «Capella Academica Wien», qu'il dirige aujourd'hui encore - décembre 2020 - malgré son âge respectable - 92 ans le 1er septembre passé!
Quelques précisions sur les instruments, toujours citées du texte d'Eduard Melkus publié au verso de la pochette du disque:
"[...] The "Capella Academica" plays valuable Italian and German instruments belonging to the Akademie für Musik in Vienna. They correspond to 18th century principles of construction with their short necks, thinner bass bars an differently shaped bridges; these instruments are played with bows of corresponding design, which are held in the Italian manner, above the nut. The wind instruments, too, are originals, the horns belonging to the Haydn Orchestra in Eisenstadt and kindly lent by the Provincial Government of the Burgenland; the oboe, which is the property of H. G. Stradner, was made by A. Grenser (1720— 1807).
The concert pitch adopted in Vienna in former times seems to have been higher than in other musical centres — as it is today — so that it almost corresponded to our modern pitch. This fact is proved by a number of wind instruments of the period which have come down to us with two tuning pieces of different lengths, the shorter of which enables the instrument to play at almost exactly the present-day pitch. The instruments of the Capella Academica are therefore tuned to A = 440. [...]"
Eduard MELKUS, un portrait fait par Andy BERNHAUT, Wien, pour Archiv Produktion
Voici donc...
Giuseppe Tartini, Concerto pour violon en sol majeur, D 78, Eduard Melkus, Capella Academica, Wien, August Wenzinger, 11-14 février 1966, Studio Wien-Film, Rosenhügel, Wien
1. (Andante) 06:35 (-> 06:35)