A. Vivaldi - Complete Recorder Concertos (Kecskemeti, Czidra) [CD]

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Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)Complete Recorder ConcertosAntonio Vivaldi was born in 1678, the son of a barber who later served as a violinist at the great Basilica of San Marco, where the Gabrielis and then Monteverdi had presided. Vivaldi studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. At the same time he won a reputation for himself as a violinist of phenomenal ability and was appointed violin-master at the Ospedale della Pietà. This last was one of four such charitable institutions, established for the education of orphan, indigent or illegitimate girls and boasting a particularly fine musical tradition, which attracted visitors to Venice from other countries. Here the girls were trained in music, some of the more talented continuing to serve there as assistant teachers, earning the dowry necessary for marriage. Vivaldi’s association with the Pietà continued intermittently throughout his life, interrupted in 1718 when he moved for three years to Mantua as Maestro di Cappella da Camera to Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, appointed governor of the city by the Emperor in Vienna. In Venice again, in 1723 Vivaldi returned to the Pietà under a freer form of contract that provided at first for the composition of two new concertos every month, some of which he would himself direct. At the same time he enjoyed a connection with the theatre, as the composer of some fifty operas, and possibly many more, and as director and manager. He finally left Venice in 1741, travelling to Vienna, where there seemed some possibility of furthering his career under the imperial patronage of Charles VI, whose relatively sudden death proved as inopportune for Vivaldi as it did for the Habsburg dynasty. Vivaldi died in Vienna in July, a month to the day from his arrival in the city, in relative poverty. At one time he had been worth 50,000 ducats a year, it seemed, but now had little to show for it, as he arranged for the sale of some of the music he had brought with him. In perfecting the newly developing form of the Italian solo concerto Vivaldi played an important part. He left nearly five hundred concertos. Many of these were for his own instrument, the violin, but there were others for a variety of solo instruments or for groups of instruments. He claimed to be able to compose a new work quicker than a copyist could write it out, and he clearly coupled immense facility with a remarkable capacity for variety within the confines of the three-movement form, with its faster outer movements framing a central slow movement.Vivaldi wrote three solo concertos for the flautino, an instrument on the identity of which there has been some speculation. It seems now agreed, however, that the instrument in question is the sopranino recorder, and not the piccolo, an instrument that makes its appearance later in the century, or the flageolet, usually so designated by Vivaldi. He shows no mercy to the little recorder, an instrument pitched an octave above

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