Vivaldi: Double Concertos for Violin and Flute.

FOR SOME years there has been a great vogue for the Baroque, although some of the critical comment has resembled that wonderful M*A*S*H routine in which Radar sighs, "Ah, Bach!" Until Monteverdi, it was the accepted wisdom that music had reached its pinnacle, that it had become the ars perfecta, to be followed only by more of the same. Monteverdi created a revolution in technique, structure, and idiom. It is not stretching it to say he was the father of modern music, at a level perhaps with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Stravinsky. Before him was Palestrina, and after him Bach. Yet Bach could never have been Bach had he not been a product of the Monteverdian innovations which not only expanded the boundaries of music but also brought it a new depth of emotion and sensibility.

The Baroque, or Bach, revival began with Mendelssohn, but over many decades it has led to the rediscovery of Vivaldi, a composer almost as prolific as Bach, and others. In recent years, this revival has been spurred by the "early instruments" movement, which has given us a closer approximation of what music sounded like from the sixteenth century forward. (This has also given us apereus on Haydn and Mozart, and opened up through the recordings of Paul Badura-Skoda many of the once "impossible" pages of the last Beethoven piano sonatas.) Yet "Baroque" is far from homogeneous. Palestrina moves along more or less on one level of meaning and involvement, and Bach never attained the musical depths and heights of Monteverdi. If this is heresy, so be it.

But there is corroboration in a number of new recordings, which I believe bear me out. Baroque: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Choral Works (EMI Classics) offers the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, the Early Music Consort of London, and resonant soloists, performing both Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli and extracts from Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine. The truncated version of the Vespro hardly compares with the full work, which some time back was issued by the New London Consort on l'Oiseau Lyre, though it contains the magnificent Magnificat. Yet it is sufficient to show how far Monteverdi had advanced both the ars musica, technically speaking, and the content of music, as well as its dark humors. If you listen closely you will hear distilled the voices that reverberate through the centuries down to our own times.

The emotion of Monteverdi, heightened by what you might almost call an inverted lyricism, compares interestingly with Bach's Magnificat (paired on an EMI CD with Handel's Dixit Dominus, performed by Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Players). For much as the joy that inheres in Bach's constructions holds us, the Monteverdi reaches deeper, aesthetically and religiously, into our mortal preoccupations. Again, it may be heretical to say this, but Bach seems more interested in structure than in any transcendent message. The greatness of Bach as a composer emerges much more clearly in such secular works as his D Minor Concerto for Two Violins, The Musical Offering, and the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which EMI has put together featuring Yehudi Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra. Here the inventiveness and the sheer energy of Bach's genius speak for themselves and are spoken for by Menuhin, sounding new and exciting even though they have been heard so often.

The spirit of the late Baroque bursts out in Vivaldi's six Double Concertos for Violin and Flute. They receive an exciting reading by Isaac Stern and Jean-Pierre Rampal, two of the greatest on their respective instruments -- though Stern should always be shown on video cassette so that the virtue and excellence of his playing can be emphasized visually by the faultlessness of his bowing and fingering. (As a fiddler manque, I may be speaking for myself alone, but surely there is an aesthetic of visual instrumental excellence.) These Vivaldi concertos (on the Sony Classical label) are the product of the late Baroque at its very best. They have an Italianate fluidity which is not found in Bach - - and they are done to a turn by Janos Rolla, leading the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra. Listening to them, I wonder how it is that in his own lifetime Vivaldi went into eclipse, his many hundreds of works virtually forgotten, until the Baroque revival of the 1950s and 1960s brought him back to prominence in concert hall and recording studio.

As a Baroque Special, EMI Classics gives us two settings of that great mystical and devotional poem, the Stabat Mater of the thirteenth-century monk Jacopone da Todi. It has captured the imagination of composers ever since then. Perhaps the most famous of these settings is by Giovanni Pergolesi, and deservedly so, for this deeply felt and delicately expressed song to the Virgin Mary, who stood by the Cross of the dying Jesus -- a song completed when the 26-year-old composer was on his death-bed -- was for centuries revered. The second setting is by the relatively forgotten Antonio Caldara -- deeper and richer in texture, and more evocative in its darker hues. Musically, moreover, it is far more interesting, with its syncopations and its use of the diminished seventh -- the "blue" note of jazz -- particularly in the Fac, ut portem Christi mortem and the Fac me plagis vulnerari, in which the forward thrust of the syncope contributes paradoxically to the gravity.