Luogo e data di registrazione		Hervormde Kerk, Bennebroek (The Netherlands) - 25/27 June 1990
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer / Editing		Stephan Schellmann (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 48 044 - (1 CD) - durata 66' 19" - (p) 1992 - DDD
	Cover Art		Ladies Concert in "Filarmonici", (Venezia 1782) by Gabriele Balla, Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

The twelve L'Estro armonico concertos, Op. 3, had established Antonio Vivaldi's reputation in Europe. The London publisher John Walsh brought them out under the blatant title “Vivaldi's most celebrated Concertos” after they had been printed for the first time around 1712 by Estienne Roger in Amsterdam. Six of the, 10 in all, Vivaldi concenos that Johann Sebastian Bach in Weimar arranged for keyboard instruments were also drawn from this Op. 3, which was circulating in numerous manuscript copies even before its first publication. In his Op. 3 the Venetian maestro had included four concertos, each for four solo violins, among them the D major concerto RV 549. The other compositions in our recording are concertos that first appeared in print during this century's extraordinary Vivaldi renaissance, the decisive impulse for which emanated at the time from Italy. In 1926 an impoverished Salesian monastery in Piedmont was obliged to sell off an abundant musical collection. Amid the remarkably rich preservations, the musicologist Alberto Gentili discovered 14 thick pigskin-bound volumes with hitherto unknown compositions by Vivaldi. With the help of the Turin financier Roberto Foà, these were acquired for the Turin National Library. An absolutely feverish search led a little later to further discoveries, which likewise passed into the possession of the Turin Library. Apart from the D major concerto for four violins, the compositions in our recording come from this comprehensive Turin archive. As far as one knows,Vivaldi composed some 45 socalled concerti ripieni, concertos for string orchestra without solo instruments. Precisely such concerti a quattro were in demand in Italy, particularly around the turn of the 17th century. According to Karl Heller (Antonio Vivaldi, Leipzig 1991), however, Vivaldi's concerti ripieni represent a late stage in the genre's comparatively short history: they were probably written in the mid-1720s. Obvious evidence of the careful work that Vivaldi devoted to them is amply provided by the numerous corrections in the manuscripts. An extensive fugue, in which an episodic motif is repeated in all the instrumental parts, permeates the first movement of the F minor concerto RV 143. As is frequently the case in the concerti ripieni, the slow middle movement - in this case an expressive Adagio only eight bars in length - has the character of a bridge passage. The finale is a ternary movement with two reprises and extensive unison writing for the first and second violins. Again in the second and third movements of the E minor concerto RV 134, Vivaldi scores the two violins frequently in unison. The introductory fugue leads into a three-part movement above a pedalpoint over several bars. In the first movement of the A major concerto RV 159 Vivaldi reuses an aria from his opera La Verità in cimento, first produced in 1720 in the Teatro S.Angelo in Venice. There are references in the third movement, also, to this opera,which is set in the realm of the Grand Sultan. The interplay between the two solo violins and a cello on the one hand and tutti passages on the other is an unusual feature in a concerto ripieno and contributes to make this mercurially lively movement a particular pleasure. The first movement of the C major concerto RV 117 largely corresponds to the overture to the serenata La Sena festeggiante. A characteristic stylistic element of French music, like the sharply dotted rhythms, brings to mind in the “Allegro alla francese” that the serenata was obviously composed in honour of the French royal family: at the conclusion of that serenata the virtues of the young King Louis XV are sung. Although the violoncello freed itself only slowly, at the start of the 18th century, from its allotted role of continuo instrument, prevailing over the viola da gamba, Vivaldi wrote at least 27 concertos for a single cello. The dates of composition are not known. But the great technical demands of many of the solo parts (use of non-adjacent strings in sixteenth note motion, and playing in the high register up into the octave above treble C) in some of these compositions argues in favour of a comparatively late date of origin. If they were written for the Ospedale della Pietà this would be fresh evidence of the extraordinary accomplishments of which some girls of the Pietà were capable. At that time, two excellent maestri di violoncello, in the persons of Antonio Vandini and (later) Bernardo Aliprandi, were engaged to teach the pupils to play the cello. The two concertos, in G major RV 413 and A minor RV 418, are among Vivaldi's most advanced cello concertos in the history of the genre's development. In these too, as was often the case,Vivaldi gave prominence to the effective contrast between the solo instrument's bass register and the cantabile tenor register. Vivaldi, who wrote double concertos for two violins, for two cellos or - as in the B flat major concerto RV 547 - for violin and cello, also experimented with the “doubled” double concerto. In the G major concerto RV 575, most probably composed for the Ospedale della Pietà, he repeatedly contrasts the two violins in pairs with the two cellos. But even in the concerto his handling of the reciprocal alternation is not at all schematic. In the middle of the third movement, for example, the two violins start up a lyrical duet above a sonorous underlay of broken-chord figures by the two cellos. In his concerto output too, Vivaldi was always capable of new surprises. Hans Christoph Worbs (Translation: © 1992 Lionel Salter)