FIRE BENEATH MY FINGERS highlights “performers as composers.”

All of the composers featured on this program were first and foremost known as performers. Their concertos reflect their skills and experience as performers, and often were written for them to perform personally.

Sammartini was feted upon his death as “the finest performer on the hautboy in Europe,” and very likely wrote the piece featured here for his own use. The first movement reflects the album’s title, played with fire and zest. The slow movement allows Judith Linsenberg to gift the listener with a virtuosic cadenza and gorgeous ornamentation. And guest performer Michael McCraw, director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University and world-renowned bassoonist, uses the bassoon concerto to show what his instrument is truly capable of in expert hands.   

Giuseppe Tartini was internationally renowned as a violinist, and much sought after as a violin teacher. His brilliant concertos are written to a very high standard, and prove difficult for many performers to deliver. Elizabeth Blumenstock performs these virtuosic pieces with technical assurance and panache. The ensemble makes the most of the sharp dynamic contrasts and dramatic changes of pace, particularly in a very expressive adagio movement.

Vivaldi’s pieces give us a different perspective. Although he too was a virtuosic violinist, the concertos here highlight the recorder and the bassoon.

Vivaldi served as both maestro de violini and maestro de concerti at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, (a combination convent, orphanage, and music school for orphans and abandoned girls), and wrote many of his concertos for the girls there. The French scholar-magistrate Charles de Brosses wrote that “they sing like angels and play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello, the bassoon: in short, there is no instrument so large that it makes them afraid of it.” The school’s performances were often attended by royalty and luminaries like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In this case, the concertos included do not only give us a time-traveling window onto Vivaldi’s own performance skills, but onto his teaching abilities, and the capabilities and lives of his well-trained and often virtuosic young students.

Recorded with remarkable clarity on period-accurate instruments, Fire Beneath My Fingers gives the listener the unique opportunity to travel back in time, and across continents, to hear these composers in a new light.

PERFORMERS: 

Judith Linsenberg, recorder
Elizabeth Blumenstock, violin
Michael McCraw, bassoon
Robert Mealy, violin
Clarie Jolivet, violin
Peter Bucknell, viola
Josh Lee, double bass
Daniel Swenberg, theorbo, archlute, baroque guitar
Charles Sherman, harpsichord, organ