Not only did he not claim to have produced a faithful edition he explicitly stated that he had created something new. It turns out that Nachèz was quite open about his revisions. Jian Yang, on the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory, uses the Vivaldi A minor as a case study to explore the pedagogical implications of using the Nachèz edition rather than an original edition. Laurie Niles has written about how much more virtuosic (and therefore difficult to learn) the Nachèz edition of the A minor concerto is than Vivaldi’s original and how she uses these differences in her teaching. Nachèz rewrote some passages in his edition to make them more virtuosic-taking some phrases up an octave, for example. As I listened to them, however, I discovered that Sarah Chang and the musicians of the Concert de la Loge weren’t just playing in a different style than the earlier recordings they were sometimes playing different notes. We could say that these latter two recordings have a more Baroque character-that they are more HIP. Finally, here is a period-instrument performance by violinist Julien Chauvin with the Concert de la Loge. But for the most part, newer recordings are fast and crisp, such as this one by Sarah Chang. I even found a fairly recent example of this style, by Boris Kuschnir. In addition to Elman’s performance, another Romantic-sounding interpretation of the Vivaldi G minor concerto is that of Itzhak Perlman. Furthermore, Suzuki’s biography claims that he was inspired to learn the violin as an adult after hearing a recording of Elman playing the Schubert Ave Maria. Suzuki and Elman were near contemporaries (Elman was born in 1891 Suzuki in 1898), so I suspect that it was the Elmanesque style of playing that got transmitted in Suzuki pedagogy.

The Nachèz editions of these two Vivaldi concertos, A minor and G minor, are the ones included in the Suzuki repertoire (A minor in Book 4, G minor in Book 5).

Concerto in g minor vivaldi