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2.0 out of 5 stars
Mediocre on all counts, Mar 29 2003
I bought this CD on the recommendation of my good friend and fellow longtime music-lover John Austin (see his review below), and after listening to it carefully twice, I'm left scratching my head wondering what he found to like about it. In fact, his assessment of this CD and mine are about as far apart as those of two listeners could be (if you read both of our reviews, you will wonder if we were both listening to the same recording). I love the baroque and have a healthy appetite for good baroque instrumental music, but to my ears the music here is second-rate: unimaginative, predictable, and repetitious (I don't think you will mistake it for Handel or Bach). Based on what we hear here, I would speculate that Veracini, a famous virtuoso violinist, had a limited ability to create interesting musical ideas, and an even more limited capacity for developing them. Furthermore, the performances don't rise above the level of well-drilled routine competence. This is music, and these are performances, that don't get off the ground. Similarly undistinguished is the quality of the engineering. Many Naxos releases have excellent sound; this is not one of them. You will want to turn down the volume, because the sound is glassy and hard; if you turn it up, the violin tone is revealed as unpleasantly edgy and steely. Moreover, the sound is congested, with poor resolution of detail and of the differentiation of the instruments in the ensemble, which seem clotted together into one homogenized, centralized mass; there is a closed-in, boxy, "canned" quality, with no sense of ambience, of openness, of separation, of the players spread out on a left-to-right soundstage. Instead this 1995 CD resembles a dated monaural recording. (And let me add that I am listening on a first-class, highly revealing system on which well-engineered recordings sound wonderful.) Naxos wisely changed the engineer for volume two (1998) in this series, which although recorded in the same hall in Verona sounds much better. In fact, volume two is preferable on all counts except length: the music is more interesting and varied, the performances more lively. To sum up, then, apart from uninspired, monotonous music, routine performances, and mediocre sound, this is a terrific recording. Seriously, I wanted to like this CD, but I'm sorry to report that I can't find anything to recommend here; in this recording one's fears of a "budget-priced" CD are realized, for everything is on the bargain-basement level. For me this is one of the disappointments of the bountiful, inviting, and often very rewarding Naxos catalog. Caveat emptor. If you want to sample Veracini on Naxos, I suggest you skip this lackluster entry and move on to volume two.
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