As Jim Mancuso messaged me:

This has been a Wonderful week for Italian Music.

Two of LA's "high culture" halls were filled to hear two great concerts.

Cecilia Bartoli was at the Chandler Pavilion and she also got rave reviews. She is an astounding performer, and the audiences love her as much as they have loved Pavarotti.

As the reviewer says of the Venice group, appearing at  Disney Hall, LA is not a town that gets crazy over old music. Nevertheless, these Italian performers are so great they cannot be ignored.

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MUSIC REVIEW

A VENETIAN TRIUMPH AT DISNEY HALL

Los Angeles Times
By James C. Taylor
Special to The Times

February 10 2004

Sunday night, it appeared as if everything that could go wrong for the Venice Baroque Orchestra did go wrong. Its music director was stuck in Italy because of illness. The interim conductor's sheet music kept falling from his stand. Even the air in the Walt Disney Concert Hall seemed determined to keep the musicians' instruments out of tune. (Almost every break between movements required extensive re-tuning.)

Yet in the face of all this pazzia, the Venetians delivered perhaps the most exciting concert performed at Disney Hall since the opening-night gala.

The all-Vivaldi evening began modestly with the Sinfonia in C major. This passage from the Venetian composer's opera "Il Giustino" gave a good introduction to the qualities that this period-instrument ensemble is known for: crisp strings, lively tempos and highly demonstrative bowing. Because of conductor Andrea Marcon's illness, first violinist Luca Mares presided over the players for this piece as well as the next: the Concerto in G minor for strings and continuo.

After this enjoyable warmup, soloist (and substitute conductor) Giuliano Carmignola entered and quickly began to dazzle the audience with his playing of two violin concertos.

The second half of the program consisted of Vivaldi's signature work, "The Four Seasons." The piece is almost ubiquitous in our society, as it is used to sell everything from European vacations to spaghetti sauce. Amazingly, however, as interpreted by this troupe, the familiar phrases sounded fresh and decidedly un-clichéd.

Much of this must be credited to Carmignola. The Treviso-born virtuoso played a 17th century violin that has never been modernized, and the instrument, thanks to Carmignola's technique and his careful study of Baroque-era playing styles, produced an immensely novel sound.

Carmignola is able to evoke the rough — often abrasive — sounds of early Italian music yet also deliver an incredible sweetness of tone in these works' lyric passages. At times, especially during the second movement of the Concerto in E-flat major, the searing notes emanating from his violin seemed to reach this listener's heart before his ears.

Carmignola's gestures were as expressive as his playing. The tall, slender musician stomped his feet for emphasis, roamed freely around the stage and struck dramatic poses that called to mind both the wild spontaneity of a Hirschfeld caricature and the sleek elegance of a Giacometti sculpture.

Luckily, the Venice Baroque Orchestra is not a one-man band (though along with Carmignola, special praise must be given to Ivano Zanenghi's dulcet lute playing). The entire ensemble performed expertly and produced a warm, unified sound. The intricacies of Vivaldi's music could be heard with crystal clarity, and the composer's tempestuous passages were passionately rendered. Instead of trying to express fury with sheer volume, the Venetians generated their power with layers of textured sound combined with tense, forceful tempos.

Los Angeles is not considered an early music town, but this first period-instrument concert at Disney Hall proved that Southern California now has a world-class venue for Baroque music — and a devoted early music audience as well.

The sold-out crowd demanded four encores, and after the second — Vivaldi's Concerto San Antonio, with an indescribably difficult original cadenza — the audience exploded into cheers, showering Carmignola with what may have been the most boisterous ovation all season.

calendarlive.com: A Venetian triumph at Disney Hall
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/
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