JULY 5 CARNIVAL IN VENICE ~ ALL VIVALDI
Saturday, 8:00pm
Venetian Theater
Tickets: $65.00, $52.50, $40.00, $27.50, $15.00 order online
Elizabeth Mann, flute; Stephen Taylor, oboe; Melanie Feld, oboe;
Marc Goldberg, bassoon; Orchestra of St. Luke's
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Concerto for in D Major, RV 428, Op. 10, No. 3, Il Cardellino |
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Concerto for Two Oboes in D minor, RV 535, Op. 7, No. 9 |
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Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Bassoon in F Major, RV 570,
RV 570, Op. 44, No. 16, La Tempesta di Mare |
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Le quattro stagioni, Op. 8, Nos. 1-4, The Four Seasons |
Carnival in Venice: a pre-concert extravaganza began at 5:00pm with Caramoor’s resident commedia dell’arte troupe, I Giullari di Piazza, followed by Caramoor’s resident Orchestra of St. Luke’s in an all-Vivaldi program featuring The Four Seasons. "St. Luke's plays like angels." -- Loren Maazel
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Antonio Vivaldi
1678-1741
Concerto for Flute in D Major,
RV 428, Op. 10, No. 3, “Il Cardellino”
Concerto for Two Oboes in D minor,
RV 535, Op. 7, No. 9
Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Bassoon in
F Major, RV 570, Op. 44, No. 16,
“La Tempesta di Mare”
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4, 1678, and died in Vienna in July (buried July 28), 1741. It is rarely possible to know when he composed a specific concerto. In the case of the three presented here, Vivaldi’s Opus 10 was published in Amsterdam by Le Cène in 1728, but there is no telling how long before that he composed the D-major flute concerto, RV 420. Moreover Opus 10 also contains a different version of the concerto titled La Tempesta di Mare for solo flute and strings. It is not clear which version came first and how long before the publication it might have been composed. The concerto for two oboes survives only in manuscript and bears no dates. The scoring of each concerto calls for s modest string orchestra with basso continuo in addition to the solo instruments listed in the heading.
For a time in the eighteenth century Antonio Vivaldi was the most famous and influential composer of the day, largely on the strength of his many hundreds of concertos, which established a style and a flexible form that other composers used for decades. But by the time of his death his work was beginning to fall into an oblivion from which it began to emerge almost by accident as a by product of Bach research in the nineteenth century. The discovery that J.S. Bach had taken Vivaldi seriously enough to copy out entire works and to rework some of his violin concertos for keyboard and orchestra caused a generation of late nineteenth-century scholars to view Vivaldi in a more respectful light.
Vivaldi was fortunate to grow up in the Italian city with the richest musical tradition of his day. His father was a violinist, though he had apparently started life following his father’s trade as a baker; he also apprenticed as a barber. But by the time Antonio was born, music was the father’s full time profession. He had been hired as a violinist at St. Mark’s under the surname Rossi (“Red”), which suggests that the nickname later given to his son, “Il prete rosso” (“The red priest”), came from the hair color (so striking in northern Italy) that was genetically dominant in the family. From childhood he suffered from a “tightness of the chest” which has been variously interpreted as asthma or angina pectoris. The fragility of his health required an entourage devoted to his care, but it did not prevent him from undertaking extensive tours during the years of his greatest fame under traveling conditions that we would find daunting.
Vivaldi was tonsured at age fifteen and ordained a priest in March 1703, but for some reason—his ill health and complete absorption with music have both been suggested—he ceased saying Mass almost immediately and had little experience in a pastoral capacity. His musical training and interest was distinctly secular. In September of 1703 he joined the staff of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà as violin teacher and later as concert director. The institution was a charitable, state-run orphanage. The girls in residence were given special training in music, and their frequent concerts were a high point in the Venetian social and artistic season. (Of course, the emphasis on their musical training was not for purely artistic motives on the part of the government, but rather to assure that the girls, when they came of age, could attract a husband who might support them and take them off the public rolls. Nonetheless at least some of them became professional musicians in their own right.) It has often been stated incorrectly that the orphanages housed only girls, but that is not the case. The orphaned boys were simply apprenticed to what were regarded as more practical professions such as carpentry or blacksmithing. Thus it was for the remarkably talented girls in this Pietà that Vivaldi composed a great many of his sonatas and concertos.
Vivaldi’s output includes over 230 concertos for violin! After that the bassoon (with thirty-seven concertos), cello (with twenty-seven), and oboe (with twenty) take pride of place. He also composed a substantial number of concertos for multiple instruments, sometimes two of a kind, sometimes two (or more) of different types.
The sheer number of concertos has sometimes led to the view that Vivaldi cranked out his works in industrial fashion, simply repeating formulas already developed and filling the template with musical ideas. This view overlooks the quite astonishing range of approaches he took with his works, and the sheer variety of sonorities that he obtained from a modest-sized ensemble.
To be sure, there are certain similarities of approach, efficiencies (so to speak) that proved so effective that they were taken up by Italian composers, as well as masters from all over Europe (including J.S. Bach), because they were so clearly useful in clarifying the shape of a piece.
Most often, the concerto begins with a fast movement, of which the main structural element is the ritornello, or “that which returns”—a complete musical statement for the full ensemble at the beginning of a movement, which sets the terms of the discussion and presents the basic musical material. It is a closed statement in the home key functioning like the abutment at one end of a bridge, establishing the firm starting point. When the ritornello ends, the soloists begin to play, generally starting with the same ideas presented in the ritornello, but expanding and developing in brilliant virtuosic ways as if improvising their own showpiece. Periodically during the course of the movement, the ritornello returns, usually abridged, in a new key. Each time this return reminds the listener of the basic material and establishes a different tonal location, rather like a pillar in the midst of a bridge’s span. Eventually the soloists engineer the music back to the home key, and the orchestra concludes the movement with a complete restatement of the ritornello—like the bridge abutment on the other side of the river, taking the listener once again to terra firma.
The middle movement of a concerto normally has a less formal organization. The full orchestra may drop out almost entirely, so that it becomes a chamber work, accompanied only by the basso continuo. The finale is again fast and often makes use of the ritornello principal, but the ritornello itself is often briefer, more given to a conversational treatment between soloist(s) and orchestra.
As the headings above indicate, Vivaldi loved to give programmatic titles to his works. Sometimes they are applicable throughout a piece, other times only for the first movement. Of course the most famous of all his programmatic works are the four concertos that make up The Four Seasons, which follow intermission; there he actually supplied a series of poems to highlight every changing image captured in the music.
The Opus 10 concertos are the first collected edition of concertos for the transverse flute, an instrument that Vivaldi did not play himself, but one that was very popular among amateur musicians in the Netherlands, where Vivaldi published many of his works. Indeed, he may never have encountered the instrument before the visit to Italy in 1724 of the superb flutist Johann Joachim Quantz (who later published a very important monograph on how to play the instrument, a book that is rich with information about many elements of Baroque musical performance.) It is not, therefore, inconceivable that Vivaldi composed these Opus 10 concertos to meet the demands of a specialized market.
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With the Flute Concerto, Op. 10, No. 3, the flute quite naturally suggests the calling of a bird, the “goldfinch” of the title. The ritornello is little more than a suggestion here, as the soloist takes off after a dozen measures with a line that seems derived from actual birdsong, especially with the constantly reiterated fourth. The slow movement is in a lilting 12/8 time for the flute with continuo, and the final Allegro offers the avian soloist different types of song. In addition to this “standard” concerto version for solo flute and strings, Vivaldi also left a fascinating version for four soloists—flute, oboe, bassoon, and violin—with basso continuo (RV 90).
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The Concerto for Two Oboes gives Vivaldi the opportunity to set up a kind of “singing contest” between the two instruments, not unlike a theatrical situation in which two prima donnas try to outdo one another for the audience’s favor. (Such situations were common in Baroque opera, and in at least one notorious performance—of a Handel opera in London—the ladies in question actually came to blows.) The elements of the Vivaldi concerto occur here, too, with the added spice of the lyric competition between the players.
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The Sea Tempest appears in Opus 10 as a concerto for flute and strings, but Vivaldi left another version, with a richer range of colors in the form of a Concerto in F for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, and Strings that unfolds exactly the same musical ideas. Again it is not clear whether this larger version is an expansion of the flute concerto or whether (perhaps more likely) the flute concerto version was reduced for the purpose of the Dutch publication. In all three movements there are musical gestures built on rapid repeated notes, scales, and arpeggios that can easily suggest (with the aid of the nickname in the title) the presence of wind and waves, the first movement driving before the storm, the slow movement viewing it in a kind of slow motion at a distance, and the last movement adopting a kind of cheerful encounter with the waves and wind as a joyous test of the sailor’s skill.
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Le quattro stagioni, Op. 8, Nos. 1-4 (The Four Seasons)
The dates of composition and first performance of the concertos that make up The Four Seasons are not known, but the work was published in 1725. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for an orchestra of strings and continuo. Duration is about 37 minutes.
Vivaldi published The Four Seasons as the first four concertos in his Opus 8, a set of twelve issued in Amsterdam in 1725. His fanciful title to the whole set, Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione (“The Test of Harmony and Invention”) hints that its contents were in some way extraordinary. The “test” in question involves the ability of music to depict specific programmatic ideas. This is particularly true of the first four concertos, entitled Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.
Vivaldi had probably performed the concertos himself on many occasions before they were published. In a live concert he could explain the program to each of the pieces. But for the publication, he chose to add four Italian sonnets, one describing each of the four concertos, and its sequence of events. And he went farther—he actually entered into the player’s instrumental parts brief descriptions of what was supposed to be happening.
This extraordinary effort was perhaps necessary because the Opus 8 concertos—and especially The Four Seasons—departed from the classic ritornello form established by Vivaldi himself in his Opus 3. There he had opened his concertos with an extended orchestral passage (called a “ritornello” [“the part that returns”] because the material keeps coming back) for full orchestra. This was designed to lay out the thematic ideas and identify the home key with rock-solid clarity. It would recur, often abridged, in various keys as the movement progressed, alternating with the soloist’s flights of invention, returning, at the end, in the home key.
In The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s ritornelli depict the continuing natural phenomena of the seasons (such as “Languor from the heat” in the opening of Summer), while the episodes provide vivid sound-pictures of events. Sometimes these are general, as in Spring: “Song of the birds,” “The brooks flow,” “Thunderclaps,” and “Song of the birds” again. Others are charmingly specific. The slow movement of Spring, for example, notes that the orchestral violins represent “The murmuring of the boughs and the grasses,” the repeated viola notes are “The barking dog,” and the gentle solo line above it all is “The sleeping goatherd.” Others show Vivaldi’s keen sense of humor, such as the staggering of the drunk in the first movement of Autumn, the crowd sleeping off the effect of their merry-making in the second movement, and the many depictions of cold weather and its effects—stamping feet, chattering teeth—at the opening of Winter. (All of these images are contained in the four sonnets that Vivaldi wrote to accompany the score.)
At the same time, Vivaldi’s concertos do exactly what a concerto is supposed to do: allow the solo violinist opportunities to display virtuosity and expressive prowess. The listener can enjoy the structure of the concerto while sharing in the delight of the composer’s imaginative use of melody, rhythm, harmony, and texture to create vivid tone-paintings.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Melanie Feld, oboe ~ Melanie Feld is principal oboist of Opera Orchestra of New York, Westchester Philharmonic and the Stamford Symphony Orchestra, and is a member of the American Composers Orchestra. She is the English hornist of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and has performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and P.D.Q. Bach. Ms. Feld has worked with such conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas, Raymond Leppard, Julius Rudel, John Eliot Gardiner, and André Previn. Her recording credits include albums on the CBS, Angel, Moss Music Group, Music Masters, Telarc, Nonesuch, and New World labels. Since 1992, she has been a member of the orchestra with the Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.
A native of the San Francisco Bay area, Ms. Feld moved to New York City to attend the Mannes College of Music, and completed her graduate studies at the Juilliard School of Music. Her teachers have included Leland Lincoln, Marc Lifschey, Stephen Adelstein, and Ronald Roseman.
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Marc Goldberg, bassoon ~ Marc Goldberg is currently a member of the New York Woodwind Quintet and principal bassoonist of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. Previously with the New York Philharmonic (associate principal bassoon, 2000-2002) and New York City Opera (acting principal bassoon, 2004-2005), he has also appeared across four continents with the Metropolitan Opera, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Solo appearances include performances with the Brandenburg Ensemble at Boston’s Symphony Hall and New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, and performances throughout the U.S., in South America, and across the Pacific Rim with the American Symphony Orchestra, Jupiter Symphony, New York Chamber Soloists, Sea Cliff Chamber Players, New York Symphonic Ensemble, and the New York Scandia Symphony. He holds BM and MM degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a student of Harold Goltzer. Mr. Goldberg is on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, The Hartt School, Columbia University, SUNY Purchase, and the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
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Elizabeth Mann, flute ~ Elizabeth Mann is a featured performer in concert halls throughout the United States, Europe, and the Far East. She is principal flutist of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, and is a member of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Recent performances include a U.S. tour of the Mozart flute concerto with André Previn; the Brandenburg Concerti with Jaime Laredo in Spain and Japan; and the U.S. premiere of the Gubaidalina Concerto for flute and violin in Carnegie Hall with Gidon Kremer and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She has performed with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road project and played principal flute with the Rotterdam Philharmonic under the direction of Valery Gergiev.
Ms. Mann has been a featured performer at various festivals including Santa Fe, Lochenhaus (Austria), Caramoor, and Moab, and was acting principal flute of the Mostly Mozart Festival this season.
She has been principal flute of the Santa Fe Opera, flutist of the Dorian Wind Quintet, played principal flute with the Minnesota Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony, and performed with the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic; and has been heard in recital at the Aldeborough Music Festival in London, the Library of Congress and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Ms. Mann attended the Juilliard School as a student of Julius Baker. Winner of the Boston Young Artist Concerto Competition at the age of 12 and of the 1981 New York Flute Competition, her career began with a solo performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She can be heard on over 100 recordings, including a recent release with harpist Deborah Hoffman of Chopin transcriptions, titled “Reflections”, which received critical acclaim. Ms. Mann also teaches seminars at Juilliard and The Manhattan School of Music.
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Stephen Taylor, oboe ~ Oboist Stephen Taylor holds the Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III solo oboe chair with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He is also solo oboe with the New York Woodwind Quintet, Orchestra of St. Luke's, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble (where he is co-director of chamber music), American Composers Orchestra, New England Bach Festival Orchestra, renowned contemporary music group Speculum Musicae; and co-principal oboe with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
He appears regularly as soloist and chamber musician at such major festivals as Spoleto, Caramoor, Aldeburgh, Aspen, Bravo! Colorado, Music from Angel Fire, Chamber Music Northwest, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and Schleswig-Holstein.
Stereo Review named his recording of Mozart's "Sinfonie Concertante" for winds (Deutsche Grammophon) the "Best New Classical Recording." Among his more than 200 other recordings are Bach arias with Itzhak Perlman and Kathleen Battle; Bach's Oboe d'amore Concerto; and premiere recordings of the Wolpe Oboe Quartet, Elliott Carter's Oboe Quartet (for which Mr. Taylor received a Grammy Nomination), and works of André Previn. He has premiered many of Carter's works including A Mirror on Which to Dwell, Syringa, Tempo e Tempi, Trilogy for Oboe and Harp (US), Oboe Quartet (US), and A 6 Letter Letter(US).
Mr. Taylor is on the faculty at The Juilliard School (where he trained with teachers Lois Wann and Robert Bloom), the Yale School of Music, SUNY Stony Brook, Purchase College Conservatory, and the Manhattan School of Music. The Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University awarded him a performer's grant in 1981. Mr. Taylor collects and restores old wooden boats and plays on a rare Caldwell model Loree oboe.
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