Program

VIVALDI: Concerto in G minor for strings and basso continuo, RV 156

I. Allegro

II. Adagio

III. Allegro

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “Si’, la gondola avere’, no crie’”

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “Cara la mia Ninetta”

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “L’occasion delle mie pene”

VIVALDI: Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, “Spring”

I. Allegro

II. Largo e pianissimo sempre

III. Allegro pastorale

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “In fin che’l tempo è bello”

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “Semplicetta è la farfalle”

VIVALDI: Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 8, RV 315, “Summer”

I. Allegro non molto

II. Adagio e piano — Presto e forte

III. Presto

________

Intermission

________

VIVALDI: Aria der Megacle “Lo seguitai felice” from L'Olimpiade

VIVALDI: Concerto No. 3 in F major, Op. 8, RV 293, “Autumn”

I. Allegro

II. Adagio molto

III. Allegro

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “Chi no ga la borsa grossa”

VENETIAN TRADITIONAL: “Co’ Checca, Betta e Catte”

VIVALDI: Concerto No. 4 in F minor, Op. 8, RV 297, “Winter”

I. Allegro non molto

II. Largo

III. Allegro

About the Program

Venice, Music, and Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi lived in Venice during one of the first great periods of artistic preoccupation with fashion — a development that both helped and hindered him. The prospect of fame probably urged Vivaldi to step beyond his comfortable life as a teacher at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (one of four Venetian orphanage-conservatoires), but the same shifts in taste saw him fall quickly from taste, even if his proto-Romantic flair for placing a higher, other-worldly value on his musical expressions proved way ahead of its time.

Like the city of Venice itself, Vivaldi possessed something of a supernatural aura induced by a combination of remarkable talent and striking looks (in his case, red hair). Some describe the so-called Red Priest as a philanderer. While that is difficult to quantify or prove, the composer was certainly not averse to self-promotion. He was, in fact, a downright boast. But he was also plagued by poor health throughout his life (a mystery illness that was probably asthma) and died destitute while attempting to revive his ailing career in Vienna.

The city of Venice, Vivaldi’s birthplace, has instilled itself in the collective consciousness and is somehow familiar even to those of us who have never been there — largely thanks to film, literature, painting, even travel brochures and news reports. Much of that is due to the city’s proliferation of water. That water necessitates boats — specifically, gondolas: flat-bottomed rowing boats that were first used in Venice in the 11th century and have been associated with the city ever since.

Before long, the gondoliers who both propelled and steered these boats with skillful use of a single oar, started to sing. Most of their songs, which together assumed the genre title “barcarolle,” are anonymous. Many parodied known styles and even languages. But the purpose wasn’t simply to while away stressful shifts on the choppy lagoon and entertain passengers. Often, barcarolles were sung in costume at staged events during Venetian festivals or boat parties. Sometimes, small orchestras the size of which Vivaldi would have known would accompany them.

The singing of the Venetian gondoliers was apparently inspired by the proliferation of opera in the city (Vivaldi may be chiefly remembered as a composer of instrumental concertos, but for many years he was the city’s most successful opera composer). In his dictionary of music, the writer Jean Jacques Rousseau noted that the songs of the gondoliers were often simplified versions of operatic arias and spilled over into popular culture following the demise of Baroque Italian opera in the city after 1750. Gondoliers were allowed into theaters for free, so there was no shortage of inspiration.

Tonight’s leader and soloist Avi Avital has made a speciality of using these traditional Venetian songs to contextualize music by the Baroque composers from the city whom we are used to hearing in concert. Many of the songs of the gondoliers were charming and bawdy. Others were more introspective or touching. In this selection by Avi that weaves its way around music by Vivaldi, there are examples of both. The operatic DNA of a song like “Si’, la gondola avere’, no crie’” is obvious. It may have been based on an aria by Johann Adolph Hasse, a German composer who had moved to Venice to work. His name is also associated with “L’occasion delle mie pene” and “Semplicetta è la farfalle.” One of the best-known traditional gondolier songs “Chi no ga la borsa grossa” brims with the bawdy character that the gondolier community displays even to this day.

VIVALDI: Concerto in G minor for strings and basso continuo, RV 156

I. Allegro

II. Adagio

III. Allegro

The orchestral concerto — a piece in which one or more solo instruments is accompanied by an ensemble — would never be the same after Vivaldi got his hands on it. As both teacher and composer, Vivaldi developed the concerto beyond recognition, inviting new instruments into its fraternity and laying foundations upon which legions of successors would build. Vivaldi’s elevated treatment of the orchestral component of a concerto joined with his formidable violin technique to make him the most influential composer of his generation. Syncopations, seamless shifts from major to minor and unusual intervals are among his stylistic hallmarks.

Vivaldi was largely responsible for making the idea of “contrast” the lifeblood of a concerto. The composer wrote over 500 concertos from the early 1700s, excelling when it came to matters of contrast between the soloists and the “tutti,” between music fast and slow, and between musical moods from the joyous and excitable to the pensive and melancholy. He did all this by hitting upon new ideals of virtuosity that would last for centuries.

Before the solo concerto gained a foothold after 1710, a concerto might well have specified no soloist at all. The word “concerto” simply implied dynamism and contrast: a musical dialogue founded on competition and rivalry as well as concord and common purpose within an instrumental group.

Vivaldi’s String Concertos or “concerti a quattro” — he wrote over 40 throughout his career — don’t call for specific solo contributions and are probably best considered forerunners to the symphony rather than the solo concerto. In other words, they adopt and develop musical material, discussing it in two fast movements either side of a brief slow interlude.

This ensemble concerto by Vivaldi is in the stormy key of G minor. In the opening movement, the rhythmically emphatic violins sing passionately over a bass line that descends alluringly through semitones or “half-notes.” After a reflective adagio, the music of the final movement surges energetically upward.

Aria der Megacle “Lo seguitai felice” from L’Olimpiade

Vivaldi purported to have written 94 operas, though only 22 have survived. His claims to be a superlative operatic composer seem to be supported by historical fact: In the second half of the composer’s life, when he really got into his operatic stride, the city of Venice staged more operas by Vivaldi than by any other composer.

One of them was L’Olimpiade, first seen on Feb. 17, 1734, at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in Venice. It is a tragicomedy which uses as its setting, appropriately for this Olympic year of 2024, an Olympic Games staged in the Greek city of Sicyon. Whoever wins the overall Olympiad will win the princess Aristea’s hand in marriage. The man who truly loves Aristea, Licida, hires a far superior athlete, Megacle, to compete under his identity. Megacle, however, is already Arista’s lover (unbeknownst to Licida).

“Lo seguitai felice” is an aria sung by Megacle — originally a countertenor (a male singing falsetto) — who frets over his friendship with Licida and its conflict with his love for Aristea. “I followed him in happiness … and I wish to follow him still,” sings Megacle in the aria, worrying that “misfortunes shall uncover a false friend’s true heart.” The florid vocal runs and patterned sequences suggest Megacle’s mental torment, only exacerbated by the music’s ratcheting up through keys — all devices Vivaldi used, to just as thrilling effect, in his instrumental concertos.

VIVALDI: Violin Concertos Nos 1-4, Op. 8, The Four Seasons

The most famous concertos of all Vivaldi’s — indeed, of the entire Baroque era — are the first four in Vivaldi’s set labeled Opus 8, a collection published as “The Contest of Harmony and Invention.” We know them, of course, as The Four Seasons.

These short concertos rank alongside Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 for the way in which they prompted new thinking about music’s capabilities. They have had musicologists chewing over vital points of aesthetic philosophy for 300 years and counting.

The crux of the issue was musical description. If you’ve ever wondered how a composer can describe specific human interactions or states of mind in an orchestral work without recourse to setting words, then you’re thinking on the very questions that were occupying Vivaldi in the early 1720s.

By now Vivaldi was working in Mantua and had already written dozens of violin concertos — including the one already heard tonight — prompted by the fact that he was probably the best violinist on the planet. But the composer was itching to explore something more: to attempt the depiction of particular landscapes and scenes (in this case, the earth’s cycle of seasons) in music that would also convey specifics of human behavior. The principle of concerto form, one soloist playing opposite a bigger ensemble, would be preserved throughout.

Vivaldi had set himself quite a challenge, but he’d also hit upon an idea that a lot of music theorists didn’t like. So-called “programmatic music” existed before, but it was seen by some as inferior and regressive. Vivaldi was determined to prove that descriptive music could be sophisticated, intricate, and virtuosic enough to be taken seriously — and that it could advance the cause of the concerto at the same time. With his unequaled gift for orchestral color and melody, if anyone could do it, Vivaldi could.

The structural thinking behind Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was that each movement — 12 in all (three per season) — would establish a certain mood, against which narrative events could then play out. When it came to the detail of those occurrences — barking dogs, drunken dancers, buzzing insects — Vivaldi delivered elegance and originality where other composers had barely moved beyond crude animal-noise clichés. Just listen, in the final movement of Winter, for Vivaldi’s portrayal of a man skidding across ice using descending octaves on the second violins and violas. In the same concerto, the soloist and lower strings conjure what one Vivaldi expert has called “fireside warmth” while violins depict icy rain falling outside.

It was generally accepted at the time that Vivaldi wrote music with flair while his colleague Arcangelo Corelli crafted with elegance. What we hear in The Four Seasons is that Vivaldi could actually do both: He could combine his sense of virtuosity with constant outpourings of melody and orchestral color while underpinning it all with a sound structural foundation.

All Vivaldi would have wanted you to know about the music was some idea of the narrative context in which it was written. For this reason, he published sonnets with each concerto, sketching out in words the stories he was trying to tell in each movement.

La Primavera (Spring)

I. Allegro

II. Largo

III. Allegro

Spring has come and the birds greet it with happy song. Then, shrouding the air with a black cloak, come lightning and thunder; when these are silent, the little birds return to their incantations.

And now, to the soft murmur of leaves and plants, the goat-herd sleeps.

To the festive sound of a pastoral pipe, nymphs and shepherds dance, greeting the glittering arrival of Spring.

L’Estate (Summer)

I. Allegro non molto

II. Adagio

III. Presto

In the harsh season scorched by the sun, man and flock languish, and the pine is on fire; the cuckoo calls and soon after, the turtledove and the goldfinch. The west wind gently blows, but the north wind contests it, and the little shepherd weeps with fear.

To his tired limbs rest is denied by the fear of lightning, thunder and the furious swarm of flies and hornets.

Alas, his fears are justified. The sky is filled with thunder and lightning and hail cuts down the proud again.

L’Autunno (Autumn)

I. Allegro

II. Adagio molto

III. Alegro

The peasant celebrates the happy harvest with dances and songs; inflamed by the liquor of Bacchus, many end their rejoicing with sleep.

The mild air invites all to the sweet delights of peaceful sleep.

The hunters set forth with horns, guns and hounds. Already frightened and tired by the great noise of guns and hounds, the wounded animal dies.

L’Inverno (Winter)

I. Allegro non molto

II. Largo

III. Allegro

Trembling with cold amidst the freezing snow, running and stamping one’s feet and feeling one’s teeth chatter from the extreme cold.

Spending contented days by the fire whilst the rain outside drenches hundreds.

Walking cautiously on ice with slow steps, spinning around, slipping, falling down, running until the ice splits; hearing all the winds at war burst forth from bolted doors — this is winter, but it brings joy.

Program notes by Andrew Mellor © 2024