Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762)
Sonatas for violoncello
Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde (violoncello, cello piccolo)
Postscript
rec. 2024, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Challenge Records CC72991 [54]

This is an impressive and rewarding account of works by one of the most individual of baroque composers, in which Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde and the ensemble Postscript show themselves to be perceptively sympathetic interpreters of Geminiani’s music. Fortunately, the recorded sound does justice to the performances.

The disc is a compelling exploration of Geminiani’s music and its interpretative possibilities, inviting listeners to experience this repertoire through a fresh and imaginative lens. Dostaler-Lalonde’s approach celebrates the spirit of invention and collaboration, making this recording a notable, if distinctive, contribution to historically informed performance. She tells us that “during the recording sessions, many […] aspects – such as ornamentation, continuo realization, and dynamics – were intentionally left to the musicians’ extemporaneous decisions”.

Elsewhere in her notes in the booklet accompanying this disc, Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde tells the reader that “what first intrigued [her] about Geminiani as a musical figure was his propensity for unpredictable, asymmetrical and improvisatory style – both as a composer and as a performer”. She quotes Charles Burney’s relation of how, after Geminiani been appointed as leader of the orchestra in Naples, “he was soon discovered to be so wild and unsteady a timist, that instead of regulating and conducting the band he threw it into such confusion; as none of the performers were able to follow him in his tempo rubato, and other unexpected accelerations and relaxations of measure”.

Much that is finest on this disc is the result of the ‘freedom’ Dostaler-Lalonde and her fellow musicians adopt in their response to these scores – a freedom which echoes the composer’s reputation as an unusual ‘timist’ but also involves significant individual responsibility and mutual trust. These qualities are everywhere evident in performances from which Dostaler-Lalonde emerges as primus inter pares – rather than simply the ‘star soloist’; all involved, especially fortepianist Artem Belogurov and cellist Victor Garcia Garcia, make valuable contributions and their interpretations are characterised by their vitality and sense of space. The recorded sound is excellent, full-bodied and, simultaneously, utterly clear and transparent.

This is, I believe, Dostaler-Lalande’s second disc on the Challenge label. The first was From Mannheim to Berlin: Sonatas for cello piccolo (Challenge CC72961), released in 2023. Reviewing it in The Gramophone, Fabrice Fitch said of it that it was “simply lovely”. This new disc of music by Geminiani is ‘lovely’ too; but founded as it is in a good deal of academic research and experiment (Dostaler-Lalande and Artem Belogurov hold academic posts at the conservatories, respectively, in Amsterdam and Utrecht) it cannot be said to be in any sense ‘simple’, it is innovative and adventurous, challenging – no pun intended – some of the modern orthodoxies of baroque performance practice, especially where basso continuo is concerned.

Glyn Pursglove

Contents
Sonata for two violins and continuo Op.1, no.2 (1710, arr. two cello piccolos and basso continuo)
Sonata for cello and basso continuo, Op.5, no. 3’ (1746)
‘Canon’ arranged for cello piccolo and basso continuo*Sonata for cello and basso continuo, Op.5, no.2 (1746)*
‘Affettuoso, arranged for cello piccolo and basso continuo’,*
Sonata for cello and basso continuo, Op.5, no. 1 (1746)
Sonata for cello and basso continuo, Op.5, no. 6 (1746)
*From The Art of Playing the Guitar or Cittra (1760)

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