Renaud Capuçon: Vivaldi and Chevalier de Saint-George - An intriguing coupling

It’s around a hundred years since the resuscitation of the Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). The first recording arrived in the 1940s and hundreds more have followed to make the work a global phenomenon. Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George (1745-99), swordsman, violinist and composer, and the man who negotiated the commissioning of Haydn’s six Paris symphonies in the 1780s, was born four years after Vivaldi’s death.

In 1974 he became the first composer to feature in Paul Freeman’s pioneering Black Composers Series for Columbia in the US. French violinist Renaud Capuçon (born 1976) here gives a leg-up to two of Saint-George’s concertos from the 1770s by coupling them with the most popular of Vivaldi’s works. Capuçon has been artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne since last year, and together they give nimble, unaffected, modern instruments accounts of the Vivaldi. They are graceful, too, in the sometimes perilous high-wire virtuoso demands that Saint-George devised to show off his own skills as a player. And Capuçon introduces some Vivaldi/Saint-George cross-fertilisation in the latter’s slow movements.

An intriguing and nicely balanced coupling.