Digital Programmes

This is our loss, for to every genre he brings the qualities of innovation, of outlandish virtuosity offset by slower music of profound beauty. 

In today’s exploration of sacred and secular, American countertenor John Holiday joins forces with Baroque orchestra Accademia Bizantina under Ottavio Dantone; this can be no more than a glimpse into the world of this prodigious composer, but it’s no less potent for that.

We travel to early 18th-century Venice, and to the Ospedala della Pietà (an institution founded to give shelter to orphans and abandoned girls) where Vivaldi was music director and under whose aegis its all-female ensembles had become ever more famous. For all Vivaldi’s fame locally, publication of music was vital to spread the word. So in 1711 he’d published his first set of violin concertos, Op 3. He titled them L’estro armonico (‘The genius of harmony’). It was a good title and caught the imagination of connoisseurs even before they looked within its pages. 

Concertos at this time had the intimacy of chamber music, and they’d often feature more than one soloist: accordingly, Op 3 has concertos for one, two and four violins. Among the four we hear today the 10th (for four violins) has a gnawing energy, with the soloists trying to outdo one another, before giving way to a magically lit slow movement with ever-shifting harmonies, crowned by a galumphing finale. Anyone who believes the cheap jibe that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto hundreds of times only need spend time with Op 3 to see how wrong that is. Take the 11th Concerto, which begins with the two solo violins in vivid conversation before being disturbed by a cello that leads off on an unexpected fugue. Or the A major Fifth Concerto, which sets off with real grandeur before the two violin soloists spoil the mood with their competitive jousting. The sorrowful A minor No 8 takes elements from the Fifth and extends them, the interplay between the soloists now more extended. And in the Larghetto the first violin enters with a moving plaintiveness but here, rather than being alone, it is joined by the second in an imitative ecstasy that foreshadows Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and even Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. The final movement crowns the concerto with a fierce energy that would be just as at home as an opera overture. 

On the subject of opera, it’s striking that even in a work as famous as The Four Seasons Vivaldi was doing a bit of self-borrowing (something to be found in the music of every self-respecting Baroque composer): ‘Spring’ takes elements from his opera Il Giustino. Time had passed since his Op 3, but he’d lost none of his sense of a good title when The Four Seasons appeared within a collection of 12 concertos in 1725 as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (‘The contest between harmony and invention’), Op 8. But what sets his Seasons apart is their direct inspiration from a set of sonnets that might or might not be the work of the composer himself. From these he conjures the most vivid musical effects, from animals and birds (the barking dog in the slow movement of ‘Spring’ or the calls of the cuckoo, turtledove and goldfinch in the opening of ‘Summer’) to more large-scale landscapes, such as frozen plains depicted in the first movement of ‘Winter’.

Equally striking is the way that The Four Seasons entirely break free from the past – the collegiate concerti grossi of Corelli and Torelli now overtaken by a fierce virtuosity and drama that will then go on to create the Classical and (even more) Romantic notion of the concerto, in which lone soloist does battle with epic forces.

That idea of the soloist emerges in Vivaldi’s sacred music too. If early sacred music featured choirs as the norm, by the 17th and 18th centuries things had shifted. Now, in the Catholic Church a single voice could be regarded as the equivalent of personal prayer. And while female voices were banned from ecclesiastical settings, they were allowed within all-female set-ups, which conveniently included the Venetian ospedali, including Vivaldi’s Pietà. However, there wasn’t the differentiation between male and female voices over which we obsess today – girls, castrati, boy trebles, countertenors: all were deemed suitable soloists for sacred works, not least because high voices were thought more angelic, and therefore closer to the divine.

The Stabat Mater was a much-set text exploring the anguish of Mary, Christ’s mother, at the foot of the Cross and set magnificently composers such as Pergolesi and Alessandro Scarlatti. Vivaldi’s is a little different, not least in that it sets a shortened version of the text, which gives the drama a particular concision. It was commissioned in 1712, just a year after the publication of L’estro armonico. The unadorned pain of the protagonist is evocatively realised in the solo voice in Vivaldi’s opening movement, contrasting with writing of stabbing immediacy in the second movement; it is only in the penultimate movement that matters become more consoling, before giving way to a closing ‘Amen’, a veritable vocal tour-de-force.

From around five years later, Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus is unusual in setting a psalm, but again what’s extraordinary is the composer’s sheer imagination in terms of colour and mood. The driving, dancing opening movement demands a singer of operatic range and agility; contrast this with the long-breathed tranquillity of the second movement; while the ‘Gloria patri’ (No 7) features the unusual colouring of a viola d’amore, an instrument on which the composer excelled; the congregation were guaranteed to be sent skipping out of the service, though with the brilliance of the last two movements, reminding us again that Vivaldi the concerto composer and Vivaldi the sacred composer were two sides of the same man.

© Harriet Smith