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Antonio Vivaldi

Sinfonia in G Play Play

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Recorded on 03/24/2007, uploaded on 09/24/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Sinfonia in G Antonio Vivaldi

Allegro, Andante, Allegro

Antonio Vivaldi, along with Bach and Handel, is one of the best known of baroque composers—his music is now probably even more popular in the twenty-first century than it was in the eighteenth. He lived to see his music be the height of what was fashionable and then also to see it go out of style. A formative influence in the development of the music of Bach, Vivaldi was the son of a baker-turned-violinist. Ordained a priest in 1703, he had also mastered the violin (it is assumed that he also played the keyboard because of his involvement in opera and the teaching of singing). Vivaldi is best known for his work at the Pio Ospedale della Pieta, one of four Venetian institutions that handled the care and training of orphaned, indigent and abandoned girls. In time, the orchestra at the Ospedale became famous for the virtuosity of its players—its services were focal items on the social calendars of Venetian nobility and of foreign visitors.

Vivaldi shows a mastery of instrumental sound and a fertile imagination—like all very prolific composers, the quality of his work is uneven, but his sense of virtuosity, especially in composing for string instruments, has given much pleasure to many generations of listeners. Along with another Venetian, Giuseppe Torelli, Vivaldi is credited with advancing the more "modern" type of concerto (also sonata, sinfonia and other types) in his predominant use of the "fast-slow-fast" format. David Schrader