BEING GUIDED BY THE LIGHT

Description

The concertos recorded here are clearly Italian in style and often recall Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. This collection of concertos was long considered lost, so much so that its existence was questioned several times. But it was eventually found in its entirety in the music and theatre library of Stockholm. Another copy also exists in Regensburg, in very poor condition and incomplete. The concertos on this disc are decidedly in the Italian style. They regularly bring to mind Antonio Vivaldi’s Quattro Stagioni violin concertos. If one examines the scoring of De Croes’s concertos, one could describe them as “concerti grossi”. Indeed, that is the designation under which they appear in the RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). However, the term is not entirely appropriate. In a concerto grosso, the two solo violins are practically on an equal footing alongside two accompanying violins. De Croes departs strongly from this pattern, as the first solo violin does most of the work while the second solo violin makes only a very limited contribution. The concertos therefore have more of the structure of a violin concerto than a concerto grosso. De Croes also plays with the distribution of roles among the different violin parts. In the first concerto, the second ripieno violin is given a more important role than its colleague, the first violin. By bringing De Croes’s violin concertos to light and recording them, we hope to help give them a prominent place in today’s repertoire. They fully deserve it.