La Sfera Armoniosa performs concertos by Willem de Fresch (dir. Mike Fentross)

Lidewij van der Voort leads on violin in this recording of six concerti grossi and a solo violin concerto by the Dutch contemporary of Handel, Willem de Fesch. While you may not be familiar with this composer, his style is approachable, echoing for me the styles of Locatelli, and in the later works, some echo of Handel. De Fesch eventually lands in London, becoming the lead violinist in Handel’s production of operas.

In this review I’ll make mention of the musical material in addition to the performance. For the performance, and specifically the recording, the ensemble is pristinely captured with good miking. The sound is natural with good perception of depth, nearly an ideal way to present a small ensemble with clarity. The ensemble itself uses a 3/violins per part, with two violas and two cellos. The ensemble plays well as a unit. While playing with a smaller ensemble today seems to be the norm for baroque ensembles, even down to one-per-part, the dialog and contrast between a soloist in a concerto grosso texture doesn’t work with a lean ensemble. The balance captured on this recording between solos and tutti works, and even more players would have supported this contrast.

Van der Voort has not been miked to sound extrapolated from the ensemble in the solo concerto, which I think was a wise decision. The solo concerto works better alike the other concertos, with the soloist emerging from out of the collective texture. Her tone is bright and pleasing, but outside the fast movements, I was in want of more improvisatory exploration. I can’t be sure, but when unknown pieces get performed, I have to imagine musicians are more timid about introducing strong interpretive color on the pieces. But aside from the speculation, there is a somewhat curious drop in virtuosity between each concerto’s fast and slow movements. It’s the one thing, I think, lacking from a balanced program—the middle movements disappoint while the faster ones are plenty interesting. The slow movement of the Op. 10 no. 3 concerto in C, as an exception, is wholly satisfying compositionally.

Before you think I’ll take toward criticizing the composer in this case, I could paint the same picture of many of Vivaldi’s concertos and their lean middle movements. The fact is, performing this music is as much about what’s on the page with what’s not. It’s my belief that composers kept these lean textures of writing to allow the performer to inflect their own skills at moving the listener. And that’s exactly how this music sits now: it’s well-written, and well-deserving of being heard, despite De Fesch’s obscurity. Mr. Fentross writes with a focus on this composer’s supposed personality in the liner notes and it’s not difficult to hear some of that in the outer movements. Each concerto is relatively short; most fall within a 7-10 minute range. The producers did not divide the recording into separate tracks per concerto, which usually is custom I’m guessing, because of the brevity of each movement. One might imagine these concertos being used as filler in operatic productions. Which, again for me, puts the middle movements with solo lines in the same league as a soprano’s aria.

All that said, I enjoyed hearing the music of De Fesch and also the musical contributions of La Sfera Armoniosa, with which I was not familiar. While these concertos don’t approach the profound, musically speaking, they are a fresh contrast to contemporary pieces in the repertoire and have been pristinely captured in this recording.