Concerto in F Major for Violin, Organ and Strings
performed Nov 23, 2003

Concerto Grosso in C Major
performed Mar 7, 2004

Long famous throughout Europe as a composer and violinist, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) lost his public during the last decade of his life. He spent his final days in penury and, like Mozart after him, was buried in a pauper's grave, his scores seemingly doomed to obscurity. In fact, more than 200 years passed before musicians made the first sustained attempt at reviving the composer's works, in the late 1940s, and even at that time, musicologists would have scoffed at the suggestion that Vivaldi could ever again attain best-seller status. Yet, in the mid-1960s, Vivaldi's music had, with storybook rapidity, regained the kind of widespread admiration and adoration it had last known in the 1720s.

The vast size of Vivaldi's concerto output, (some 500 surviving works), was a consequence of the composer's 35 years of employment at Venice's Pio Ospedale della Pietà, where new music was constantly needed for the weekly Sunday public concerts presented by the students. The Pietà originated as a shelter and school for female orphans, but soon proved of such educational excellence (particularly in music) that the wealthy citizens began sending their daughters there. Clearly, the Pietà girls were superlatively trained musicians, or so Vivaldi's concertos indicate.

Vivaldi apparently considered such student works of less importance to his career than his operas, forty-six of which survive though there may have been many more. He repeatedly took leaves of absence from the Pietà to supervise productions of his stage works in various Italian cities.

The Concerto in F Major for Violin, Organ and Strings, RV542 is notable for its single virtuoso organ cadenza, which may have been performed by Vivaldi himself, and rapid-fire exchanges between the violin and organ.

If there is a notable attribute to Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in C Major, F.XII no. 2, it's undoubtedly the use of clarinets. During Vivaldi's lifetime, the clarinet was nothing more than an embryonic instrument; it would be more than 30 years after Vivaldi's death that the clarinet would finally be accepted as a full member of the orchestra. The atmosphere at the Pietà school where Vivaldi taught, however, must have been an adventurous and accepting one. Vivaldi writes for the clarinets on equal footing with the oboes, and we are treated to a sound rarely heard in the orchestral repertoire, as modern composition students are routinely instructed not to double clarinet and oboe on the same pitch, which Vivaldi uses masterfully.

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