Ave Maria (Vavilov, attr. Caccini)

[Martin Jonas]

This widely-performed aria was written around 1970 by Vladimir Vavilov (1925-1973), a Russian early music revivalist. Vavilov routinely ascribed his own works to other composers, usually Renaissance or Baroque, often with total disregard of a style that should have been appropriate. His own 1970 recording of "Ave Maria" was credited to "anonymous", but shortly after Vavilov's death the scores were circulated with an (entirely spurious) attribution to the Italian renaissance composer Giulio Caccini (1551-1618). After the piece was recorded in 1987 under the name "Caccini's Ave Maria", it came to be famous worldwide and has become part of the classical Christmas concert repertoire (see Wikipedia).

This arrangement for mandolin orchestra is by an anonymous Japanese arranger, found at the Nakano site (see attached PDF). I have recorded it as a mandolin quintet on two mandolins, mandola, mandocello and tenor guitar.

1915 Luigi Embergher mandolin
1890s Umberto Ceccherini mandolin
1925 Zimmermann waldzither
Suzuki MC-815 mandocello
Ozark tenor guitar



Martin

[vkioulaphides]

As accomplice to the musicological crime-of-the-century, I once arranged this piece for a church service; it did sound nice, while shockingly out of style...

Cheers,

Victor

[Martin Jonas]

Further to my old 2014 recording in the original post above (which now sounds rather plodding to my ears), I have today revisited the Nakano arrangement of this piece as part of my current lockdown video recordings.

For my new recording, I have stripped it down to a trio of two mandolins and mandola (in G), discarding the mandocello, guitar and bass parts of the Nakano arrangement. I first recorded the lead mandolin part on both video and audio, then extracted the audio and overdubbed second mandolin and mandola before re-joining it to the video. I think this is more musical than my old version (better played, in any case), and the sparse instrumentation suits the piece.

1898 Giuseppe Vinaccia bowlback mandolin (x2)
Mid-Missouri M-111 octave mandolin

Apologies for the poor-resolution video. I was losing daylight and my webcam doesn't cope well with artifical light.



Martin

[ssjk]

Thank you. I quite enjoyed that. I went back and listened to your previous version and I agree with you regarding musicality and especially the sparseness of the instrumentation. Nice update - always like to see someone playing as well, so thanks for the process notes.

[Rob MacKillop]

I can't get the first video to play. It says "The owner of this video has granted you access. Please sign in" which seems odd. I'm using Safari.

[Martin Jonas]

I can't get the first video to play. It says "The owner of this video has granted you access. Please sign in" which seems odd. I'm using Safari.

Thanks, Rob. After uploading the new video, I changed my old video from 2014 to "private" in Youtube, which is why you saw that message. Ssjk managed to sneak in to watch it just before I changed, that's why (s)he was able to compare my old and new recordings.

Now that I've updated it, I don't think you'd want to watch the old one. That one was an audio-only recording using a click track with the parts sight-read without much prior practice, and was primarily intended for me to try out this Japanese arrangement to see if we could realistically play it at our weekly mandolin practice group. Because of this, it sounded a bit mechanical. This new one is played more freely and hence is more musical (I hope).

Martin