Before electric guitars, Venice had violin gods.
Early eighteenth century Venice was a global capital of Baroque music, with audiences who attended performances as informal, rowdy entertainment. Concertgoers were loud and opinionated, quick to applaud for a brilliant passage and quicker to jeer at failure.
At the center of it all was a relatively new instrument that hadn’t yet learned to behave: the violin.
The violin was fast. It was flashy. And it was a little confrontational. It could whisper or it could scream. It could show off in ways many older instruments couldn’t. And in Venice — a city of egotistical, ferociously competitive violinists who would go on to become some of the biggest Baroque composers — it became the perfect vehicle for ambition.
Antonio Vivaldi. Francesco Maria Veracini. Giuseppe Tartini. Pietro Antonio Locatelli. These were not composers who happened to play the violin. They were violinists first. And not just pretty good violinists. Scorchingly amazing violinists. And competitive to the point of narcissism. So their compositions were essentially designed to demonstrate their musical superiority over their rivals.
“The violin became an instrument of confrontation, an ideal weapon for demonstrating virtuosity and technical prowess,” wrote Venice Baroque Orchestra conductor Andrea Marcon and violinist Chouchane Siranossian. “The player’s ultimate goal was to astonish the listener and to demonstrate his own bravura, to the point that certain narcissistic tendencies of the player were often exaggerated.”
When Tartini first heard Veracini play in Venice in 1716, Veracini’s dramatic playing impressed him so deeply that Tartini withdrew to practice intensively, later reemerging with technical masterpieces like the famous “Devil’s Trill” sonata, inspired by a dream in which the devil played the violin.
Antonio Vivaldi wrote concertos that astonished audiences with their speed and exuberance (and still do). Locatelli pushed the violin to technical extremes with works like L’Arte del Violino, a collection of concertos with notoriously demanding solo caprices, earning him the title of “Paganini of the 18th century,” in reference to the brilliant violinist whom many consider the greatest of all time, Niccolo Paganini.
What survives on the page today is ornate passagework, relentless runs, and intricate melodic lines that center virtuosic violin playing designed to impress audiences on first hearing.
Centuries later, it’s easy to think of Baroque music as polite, relaxing, classical (a term that wasn’t even invented until the following century), but that was hardly its intent. These pieces were written to win the night.
Now, Venice Baroque Orchestra’s latest program, A Bows Duel in Venice, pulls from the catalogues of these “four musketeers” of the violin — Vivaldi, Veracini, Tartini, and Locatelli — in a musical combat. On this battlefield, the violin is a weapon.
And a battlefield it most certainly is. The demands of performing these works are cumulative — the physical strain on the body, the mental focus required to sustain precision at speed, the two-hour exposure under the spotlight. There is nowhere to hide.
Enter Chouchane Siranossian.
Siranossian is not just a specialist in Baroque music; she is a violinist with the stamina, fearlessness, and attitude to pull off this program. Performing on a Baroque violin — with gut strings, a shorter neck, no chin rest, and a lighter and shorter bow — by Giuseppe and Antonio Gagliano, the margin for error is much smaller, and control must be earned.
There are more famous violinists in the world. But there are few who can stand up to this program and live to tell the tale.
Siranossian’s virtuosity was described as “diabolical” by the Sunday Times. The Gramophone wrote, “If the devil really does lurk among those Tartini trills, there doesn’t seem much chance of him knocking her off her stride. Her musicianship is likewise faultless, unconcerned with tricks and quirks but rather on letting her violin do the speaking. This is top-class Baroque violin-playing.”
This is classical music before it became something to quietly admire. It is bold, physical, showy, and written by violin rockstars who wanted to be better than everyone in the room — and who wanted audiences to know it.
You don’t need to love classical music to be blown away by what’s happening here. Performing alongside the world’s premier Baroque ensemble, Sirannosian is demonstrating peak musicianship, excellence under pressure, in real time.
Three hundred years later, the challenge still stands. You don’t have to know the rules to recognize a duel.