ABOUT THE MUSIC

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)

Concerto for Strings in F major RV136

Allegro

Largo

Menuetto: Allegro

Vivaldi’s father was a violinist at St. Mark’s, Venice, and Antonio continued in that vocation even after taking holy orders in 1703, spending nearly three decades working at the celebrated Venetian girls’ school, the Ospedale della Pietà. Dubbed il prete rosso (the red priest) on account of his fiery hair, he’s sometimes seen as representing a quite distinctively Venetian school of string writing. Certainly, in his own lifetime, his brilliance as a violinist shaped his compositions and, in Italy at least, overshadowed them – the playwright Goldoni described him as “excellent jouer de violon et compositeur médiocre”. Posterity has tended to disagree.

Vivaldi worked in every major genre of his day, and with breathtaking energy and invention. “I have heard him boast that he has composed a concerto, in all its parts, faster than a copyist could write it out” recalled the French traveller Charles de Brosses, and an oft-repeated anecdote has Vivaldi abandoning his priestly office midway through saying Mass in order to scribble down a melody. The truth – as suggested by the dancing, headlong energy of the outer movements of this Concerto for strings and continuo, RV 136, and the elegant poise of the central Largo - seems to have been that ideas came to him prolifically, and in all sorts of forms. We’ll hear further evidence of his versatility later; for now, here’s proof that in an era dominated by Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, the Red Priest was very much his own man.

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741)

‘Chi alla colpa’ from Armida al campo d’Egitto

‘Veni, veni me sequere fida’ from Juditha Triumphans ‘Orribile lo scempio’ from La Silvia ‘Gelido in ogni vena’ from Farnace

Venice sees itself – with some justice – as the cradle of opera. Certainly, it’s a city that loves spectacle, fashion, ceremony and illusion, and never more so than during the annual carnival season between Christmas and Shrovetide, when masked revellers defy floods and darkness in pursuit of pleasure, and when – in the baroque era – the city’s theatres competed to stage the newest and most sensational operas. Vivaldi – a Venetian to the tips of his ginger hair – composed at least 90 operas: courtly spectacles and spirited farces; tales of ancient heroes, tragic lovers and magical beings, set to music of breathless energy and aching passion.

Armida al campo d’Egitto dates from carnival season in 1718: one of over 50 operas inspired by Torquato Tasso’s romance of the crusader Rinaldo and the seductive pagan sorceress Armida. Vivaldi liked this aria so much that he recycled it in at least two further operas. Farnace (1724) was something of a hit in its day, telling the story of King Pharnaces of Pontus, who, defeated by the Romans, orders his wife Tamiri to kill their son and then herself. She expresses her reaction – “Like Ice in Every Vein” - in this tragic aria, in which Vivaldi (unsurprisingly given the subject) echoes his own Winter concerto from The Four Seasons. It’s all closely tailored to the (clearly formidable) voice of the mezzo-soprano Anna Girò

– formerly one of Vivaldi’s pupils at the Pietà. La Silvia is the odd-one-out here: composed not for Venice but for an imperial birthday celebration in 1721 at the court of Milan. And the bloodand-thunder aria Orribile lo scempio is another recycling job: repurposed from an opera that Vivaldi composed in 1719 for a similar occasion in Mantua. But why mess with a winning formula?

ANTONIO

VIVALDI (1678-1741)

Concerto for Flute in G minor RV 439

La Notte

Largo

Presto (Fantasmi)

Largo

Presto

Largo (Il sonno)

Allegro

The idea of using musical instruments to imitate nature is as old as the legend of Pan and Syrinx. The controversy that surrounded that idea is scarcely less old. In its own time, that most beloved of musical nature-paintings – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons - was attacked by the composer

Francesco Geminiani:

The imitating of the cockerel, cuckoo, owl and other birds, and also sudden Shifts of the Hand from one extremity of the Finger-board to the other…rather belong to the Professors of Legerdemain and Posture-masters than to the Art of Musick. Everyone, it seems, disapproved, except the public; but in the eighteenth century, composers lived to please their public. In 1728 Antonio Vivaldi bundled up the manuscripts of six flute concertos and dispatched them to the publisher Le Cène of Amsterdam. Three of the six had descriptive titles: “The Storm at Sea”, “The Goldfinch” and this second of the set, subtitled La Notte (“The Night”).

Vivaldi had originally composed it as far back as 1710 as a work for chamber ensemble, and in its new incarnation it retained its free, multi-movement form – as befits the night; a time when the imagination runs wild and free. The old saw about Vivaldi “writing the same concerto 450 times” has never seemed less appropriate: the music is alternately solemn, restless (the turbulent second movement is headed Fantasmi –“phantasms”) until in a slow movement entitled La sonna (“slumber”), sleep finally arrives on softly muted strings. But as the finale demonstrates, a restful night is never wholly guaranteed…..

GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681-1767)

Sonata à 4 in A minor TWV 43:a5

Grave - Allegro

Allegro

Grave- Allegro

Telemann was a supremely practical musician. A self-taught violinist, harpsichordist and recorder player, he set himself to master every aspect of his art. “Fired by enthusiasm”, as he recalled in his autobiography:

I also turned to learning how to play the oboe, transverse flute, chalumeau, viola da gamba and even the contrabass and the bass trombone.

He didn’t know it at the time, but it was excellent training for his later career in Hamburg. In this booming Hanseatic seaport he found a ready market for collections of chamber music aimed at