Luogo e data di registrazione		Brahmssaal, Musikverein, Vienna (Austria) - 1953
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Seymour Solomon
	Engineer		-
	Prima Edizione LP		Vanguard - The Bach Guild | BG-538 | 1 LP - durata 43' 17" | (p) 1954
	Edizione CD		Vanguard Classics | 08 9132 72 | 2 CDs - durata 66' 01" - 63' 09" | (p) & (c) 1993 | ADD | Only Concerto RV 317
	Cover Art		Jules Halfant
	Note		Billboard, 21 August 1954

The Venice in which Antonio Vivaldi (1680-1743) lived and worked was a flourishing center of music. In 1637 Venice opened the first publich opera house, taking opera from Florence and Rome, where it has been a refined court entertainment, and making it into a sumptuous popular spectacle. The four city Ospedali, or orphanges, became budding conservatories, in each of which some forty to sixty girls were trained in music and soon some of the finest choral and instrumental music in Italy was being heard at these Ospedali, of which the most eminent musicians were proud to be directors. It was with the Ospedale della Pieta, one of the oldest of these institutions, that Vivaldi was associated as director for most of his career. A famous violinist, like Corelli who preceded him and Tartini who followed him, and the first to explore the possibilities of the solo violin concerto, he was also one of the most poetic and imaginative of composers. He was a true Venetian. The great artists who had painted the splendors and gathering shadows of the Venetian Republic of a century before, such as Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, had been distinguished for their joy in life and love of nature, expressed in a radiance of color. They had been known as the "impressionists" of the Renaissance and Vivaldi was one of the first great tono colorists of orchestral music, combining winds and strings with a sensitivity and freedom previously unknown in the concerto. The poetic bent of his mind may be seen in the titles of many of his concertos: Il Sospetto, La notte, Madrigalesco, L'inquietudine, Alla rustica, Per la S.S. Assunzione di Maria Vergine, Le Quattro Stagioni, Il Cardinello. Because of the nature pictures of his music, Vivaldi is often referred to by music historians as one who foreshadowed 19th century romantic music. But while his influence on the development of music is great, he is whally a genius of his times. His sweetly singing "Bullfinch" has much in common with the cuckoo that sings in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, but has no relation to the philosophical forest bird of Wagner's Siegfried, Vivaldi's inspiration came in part from the opera of his own time, to which he himself contributed thirty-eight works. and when we learn that Venetian opera was famous for its scenes of pastoral idylls, dreams, incantations, storms, shipwrecks, and battles, we need look no further for the poetic and colorful quality of his music. In his instrumental works, Vivaldi did not try to point pictures or tell a story. What he tried most of ait to capture in music was a feeling of the sensitive awakening of the human being to the oalor and movement of life, with both pathos and joy. This was reflected not only in his iridescent tone colors, but also in his beauty of singing melody and estraordinary plasticity of form. As against the episodic and strict regularity of Corelli's concertos, Vivaldi makes the concerto form a malleable thing in his hands, yet always giving it an inner logic. It was this form that so attracted Johann Sebastian Bach who took Vivaldi's concertos as the definitive form an which he modelled his own Brandenburg Concertos and solo concertos. Bach transcribed mani of Vivaldi's concertos in the process of studying them, arranging six of the works in L'estro armonico for organ and for clavier with orchestra. This record brings together four of the most attractive Vivaldi concertos. The two solo violin concertos, in G minor and A minor, are played with the bass realized by Tivadar Nachez, the eminent concert violinist of the late 19th century. The D minor concerto for two violins and strings, heard here in its original form, is one of the Vivaldi works transcribed by Bach for organ. It's lovely slow movement has also became a violinist's and 'cellist's encore piece. The "Bullfinch" concerto is one of the classic works for flute, ranking with but entirely different from Mozart's concertos for this instrument, and is also one of the most engaging of Vivaldi's nature pieces. The G minor concerto for violin and orchestra is No. 1 of Vivaldi's Op. 12, a collection of six solo concertos published in Amsterdam in 1727-34. It belongs in the great line of solo violin concertos, and is distinguished by its deep emotional content and organic form. In the first movement, Vivaldi departs from the Corelli concerto from with its regular alternation of tutti and solo passages, each with its own material. Here the tutti passages link up with the solos, thus gibing the entire movement a dramatic life and continuity. The slow movement is unusually broad even for Vivaldi, with weaving violin arabesques creating a melodic line of hauting and plastic beauty. The last movement returns to the first movement form, but with lighter, dance-like themes. The A minor concerto, for solo violin and orchestra, is No. 3 of Vivaldi's Op. 6, L'estro armonico, the collection of twelve concertos published in 1700. It resembles the G minor concerto in form but is not as broad in scope. again there is, in the first movement, a definite link between the tutti theme and the solo passages, which use the tutti as a spring-board. The slow movement is a lovely aria, and the last movement is in characteristic dance rhythm. The D minor Concerto Grosso, Op. 3, No. 11 L'estro armonico, indicates how frealy Vivaldi deported from the form he himself had developed. The title of the set, which has been translated as "harmonious rapture", is a clue to the exciting explorations of modulation and the structural use of harmony upon which Vivaldi embarks here. The first movement immediately introduces the two solo violins, in brilliant figurations powerfully built up over a sustained D in the lower orchestral voices. A short adagio of solemn chords follows, and then there is a fugue, with the first two entries of the subject announced by the orchestra and the next two by the soloists. The largo is one of Vivaldi's most beautiful melodies in siciliana rhythm. The last movement like the first, starts with a brilliant declamation by the soloists. And like the first movement, it exhibits Vivaldi as a marvellous orchestrator, for what we have is not so much a concerto for two violin soloists as an essay in the subtle variations of color possible in the interplay of smaller and larger bodies of strings. The Concerto for flute and orchestra, Op. 10, No. 3, called Il Cardellino or "The Bullfinch", is also a masterpiece of instrumental color and novelty of form. The solo flute announces itself at the beginning, chirping an antiphonal answer to the tutti. It then develops its own full-throated song, joined by the concertino of solo strings, which trill in company with it. The entire movement is an increasingly free development of the lyrical voice of the flute, until the opening tutti theme announces the end. The slow movement is a sweet siciliana. In the last movement Vivaldi achieves the most subtle variety of colors with is concertino group of flute and strings, in interplay with the full body of the orchestra. Notes by S. W. Bennett About the Performers The Chamber Orchestra of the Vienna State is made up of some of the most proficient instrumentalists in Europe, molded together into a group whose prowess can be seen in the unity of spirit of this conductorless performance. Gustav Leonhardt, at the cembalo, is an outstanding Dutch musicologist, cembalo player and organist, famous for his newly studied performances of Bach's Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations, and a professor of musicology and the cembalo at the Vienna Academy of Music. Jan Tomasow is the extraordinary solo violinist whose Vanguard recordings of Mozart's Divertimenti, K. 287 and K. 334, have won the enthusiastic praise of American critics, such as the N. Y. Herald Tribune's "Mozart played this way is a treat hard to match."