Notes for: July 23, 2019
Eighteenth-century Venice was a musical mecca, and for many years no star shone brighter than Vivaldi’s. His output was enormous, his innovations widely influential, his work admired and popular throughout Western Europe. Although he studied for the priesthood, his passion always was music. Early on, he abandoned priestly duties in order to teach at and compose for an unusual institution: Ospedale della Pietà, a charitable home for orphaned children, many of whom were most likely the illegitimate offspring of Venetian noblemen. The most musically talented girls were trained as singers and instrumentalists, who then became members of a celebrated choir and orchestra. As one 18th-century visitor wrote, “They sing like angels, play the violin, the recorder, the organ, the oboe, the cello, the bassoon; in fact, there is no instrument large enough to frighten them.”
Foreign visitors flocked to the Pietà’s weekend concerts, for which, week after week, Vivaldi supplied music. He wrote with astonishing speed, once boasting that he could write a concerto faster than it could be copied. Over the years he poured out more than 500 concertos for various solo instruments. Among the standards he established were the Baroque concerto’s three-movement, fast-slow-fast pattern; its dialogue between the orchestra (tutti) and a virtuoso soloist; and the organization of a first movement around a ritornello, a recurring motif that alternates with contrasting sections. Many of Vivaldi’s concertos were for the violin – he was a renowned virtuoso – but the Ospedale also was well known for its wind players, and beginning probably in the 1720s, Vivaldi wrote scores of concertos for the flute, the oboe, and the bassoon, an instrument that had been regarded as inelegant.
Vivaldi experimented continually with new ways to tap into instrumental color and sonority. Among his notable approaches to instrumental expression are some two dozen so-called chamber concertos, in which he pared down the number of instruments to as few as three, with the soloists taking both orchestral and solo parts. The Concerto in G Minor for Flute, Oboe, and Bassoon is a delightful example. Its three instruments of very different timbres make for a tonally colorful combination. In the sprightly, syncopated first movement, all three present the opening tutti section, after which the flute emerges as virtuosic soloist, with the oboe reappearing with the ritornellos and the bassoon providing harmonic support. The flute and oboe share the melody over the bassoon obbligato in the Largo, a lovely movement with the long, lyrical lines of an operatic aria, and again in the Allegro, whose chromatic theme sweeps along with great energy over busy bassoon figures. The Concerto is an engaging look at how Vivaldi, within a standardized format, created works rich in melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic invention.