[SACD-R][OF] Le Concert des Nations, Jordi Savall - Luigi Boccherini: Fandango, Sinfonie & Musica Notturna di Madrid - 2005 (Chamber)

Amazon reviews:

By Peter T. Wolf on March 25, 2012:
What everyone wants to hear in a recording of the famous Boccherini fandango is how wild can the performers make the final movement. How to squeeze out as much emotion as possible. And in this performance (by Savall naturally) we have that. Not only does he layer on the castanets, violins & guitars, but he does something unexpected but logical, for Jordi Savall that is. He EXTENDS the length of the fandango !! I know this piece of music well ( I have several recordings) & so when I was expecting the coda, instead we get a reprise of the whole spirited finale ratcheted up to even higher intensity & noise. It rocks !! Evidently the published length of the piece was not enough for Savall & his musicians. They wanted to give us a fandango we’d never forget. They succeeded.
Stanley Crowe on August 28, 2013:
This is a beautifully recorded program of music by Luigi Boccherini consisting of 2 string quintets (1 with the addition of guitar & castanets) & 2 symphonies, all written in the 1780’s or so & thus contemporary with Haydn & the young Mozart. But Boccherini, Italian-born, had become a musician at the Spanish court from the mid-1770’s on, & these pieces have a Spanish flavour that is quite irresistible. The oddest piece, designated a Quintet but really a suite, is based on the “music of the night in Madrid,” & is really a piece of program music in which a string quintet imitates bells, drums, & winds in creating impressions, in brief movements, of the night noises of Madrid. It’s clever but it’s elegant too, & just beautifully done here, & the whole 7-movement piece comes in at under 14 minutes. The other quintet, subtitled the “Fandango,” has a lovely pastorale opening (borrowed from another piece by Boccherini) but it’s most notable for its final movement, the fandango itself, which is longer than the other 2 movements combined, but it captures the spirit of the dance with an engaging swing (castanets & guitar featured well) that as soon as it’s over you want to hear again. The 2 short symphonies are played by the full Concert des Nations period instrument group, & their movements seem to be dance-based too, though not specifically Spanish. They don’t outstay their welcome, & they’re played with rich tone & commitment by this excellent group under the legendary Jordi Savall, whom most listeners might know from his association with the groups Hesperion XX & XXI. Boccherini was a cellist, & his cello concertos are well-known. Here’s another side of him, & I find it totally charming.
AllMusic:
It has taken a long time for Jordi Savall to get around to the music of Luigi Boccherini, an Italian composer who, nevertheless, looms very large in the old Spanish music of which Savall is such an eloquent advocate. If the AliaVox release Luigi Boccherini: Fandango, Sinfonie & La Music Notturna di Madrid is any indication of Savall’s potential in interpreting the music of Boccherini, then it was well worth the wait. Best known outside of Europe for his ubiquitous Minuet in A, Boccherini is often misunderstood as a fancy-pants composer of sugary confections for the court à la Dittersdorf, but anyone who knows his String Quartets, Op. 32, or any of the works belonging to this carefully chosen program already knows that Boccherini’s music has some teeth.
The soloists, drawn from within Savall’s group Le Concert des Nations, are superb in this music; Bruno Cocset has the all-important cello parts, which Boccherini himself would have played, & lutenist Rolf Lislevand delivers the guitar solo in the Fandango with a dashing, yet sensitive touch. Boccherini’s much-loved, but seldom-recorded La Musica Notturna della Strade di Madrid gets its best ever recording here, stylish in presentation yet not downplaying some of the grit in Boccherini’s score. An additional surprise here is a stormy D minor symphony from 1787 worthy of the best proto-Romantic Stürm und Drang efforts one might expect from C.P.E. Bach & Haydn’s middle-period symphonies; then the A major symphony is a lighter & more typical piece, but is substantial nonetheless.
Boccherini’s dance & character pieces sound oddly modern, not in a “Stravinsky-like” sense, but in an “upbeat & contemporary” sense. Some of the music, if played with too lush an ensemble, can take on an unintended travelogue-like feel, & one is not sure that Savall fully avoids this in the slow sections of the Fandango. On the other hand, these same portions are also among the most radio-friendly on this disc, & do draw the listener into the music. For those who continue to wonder what the Classical period has to offer outside of Haydn, Mozart, & Beethoven, AliaVox’s Luigi Boccherini: Fandango, Sinfonie & La Music Notturna di Madrid offers a resounding, & at times, giddily intoxicating answer.