Giovanni Benedetto Platti was born in or near Padua in 1697 and died in Würzburg in 1763. A singer, excellent musician and gifted Italian composer, he came from a musical family – his father played the viola in the San Marco ducal chapel in Venice where Platti studied with Gasparini. Then in 1722 he moved to Germany, to work for the prince-bishop of Würzburg, where his Italian colleagues included the singers Bassani and Bellotti. Platti spent the rest of his life in Germany, marrying the soprano Therese Maria Langprückner in 1723; several of their eight children were musicians. His musical talents were appreciated – he played the violin, oboe and harpsichord, and was a good chamber music tenor.
The sonatas for trio and for cello are clearly preclassical compositions; the instrumental parts are well distributed, so the music unfolds cleverly to take in the symmetry of Philip Emanuel Bach’s instrumental style coupled with a thematic unity looking ahead to Haydn’s more mature pieces.
Vivaldi is known as the priest who never said mass – that alone sounds like a stravaganza, one of those pieces of Venetian baroque that surfaces when you mention Vivaldi! Extravagant, bizarre, capriccioso, combining talent and imagination, freedom of expression, eccentric and paradoxical use of surprise – all smoothly blended with a certain propensity for enjoyment, sensory pleasures and hedonism.
The extravagance lies in the art of dissimulation, with a restless tendency to distort things that is the kingpin of much of the imaginative “illusionist”, often dream-like painting of the same period or much earlier. Baschenis’ paintings of musical instruments come to mind, Poussin’s still-lives, Bosch’s Flemish fantasies – even some of Tiepolo and Guardi’s inventions.
Vivaldi did not consider stravaganza as spectacular folly, simply for entertainment; he exploited it as a means of expression, thoughtfully studied and applied with the appropriate “colours”. Examples are his “untuned” violin strings, his imitations of animal calls and birdsong on the violin – or his choice of instruments to achieve special rich impasti, using timbre more than harmony. The sound dips and rises, the strings use their mutes, and he calls on a profusion of incredible instruments to achieve astounding effects: viols, lutes and archlutes, hunting horns and even a tromba marina.
Here we see Vivaldi tackling the violin sonata, with basso continuo, and the trio sonata, harking back to Corelli. Michael Talbot, a historian and biographer who has studied Vivaldi, maintains that he cultivated the sonata only as a “complement” to his concerto output, and that very probably most of the sonatas were not composed singly, like the concertos for the Ospedale della Pietà, but in groups, for private benefactors rather than institutions. The music nevertheless offers richly original passages, admirably blending church and chamber styles. The stylized patterns of music for dancing lend themselves to displays of virtuosity, with an impressive range of rhythms and tempi and finely honed construction, the composition flowing out smoothly.
 

Luigi Di Fronzo