Исполнители:Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, conductor Neville Marriner
solo violins
Alan Loveday, Iona Brown, Carmel Kaine, Roy Gillard, Ronald Thomas
solo cello
Kenneth Heath
continuo
Christopher Hogwood, Colin Tilney (harpsichord & organ)
Robert Spencer (theorbo)
The place of Venetian-born Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) as a concerto composer is today firmly established, largely thanks to the ubiquitous Four Seasons. What is perhaps less fully appreciated is Vivaldi's importance in the development of the concerto genre as a whole. When his groundbreaking set of concertos was published by the Amsterdam publisher Etienne Roger as opus 3 in 1711, the form was no more than about 30 years old.
L'estro armonico, the rubric that heads Vivaldi's first published set of concertos (a group including works that may date back as far as the final years of the seventeenth century), does not translate easily, but is generally rendered as something like "The Harmonic Fancy." It is apt in the sense that it conveys some sense of the unusual or bizarre that features so strongly in Vivaldi's musical make-up. All 12 concertos are concertino works scored for strings and continuo, which is to say that they call for one or more players who both form part of the ensemble (the ripieno) and function as soloists. This division is generally articulated in quicker movements by the contrasts of weight and texture between recurring full tutti sections and those episodes in which the soloists develop and expand the thematic material. Known as ritornello form, it was to become the standard form for the quicker movements of the Venetian concerto, a form that would exert a powerful influence throughout Europe. Slow movements adopt a more varied form, but are lyrical pieces, sometimes a tutti unison (No. 1 in D) or gentle repeated chords (No. 5 in A, No. 11 in D minor) that are distinguished overall by their cantabile writing. Nine of the 12 concertos adopt the three-movement form in a fast (allegro)-slow (largo)-fast (allegro, or, in the instance of No. 6 in A minor, presto) scheme that would also become the paradigmatic format for the Italian concerto. In two concertos, Nos. 4 in E minor, which has four short movements, and 7 in F, which has five equally brief sections, Vivaldi adopted the multi-sectional form of the Corellian concerto grosso, a type he thereafter abandoned. Significantly, these are two of the four works in L'estro armonico (the others are No. 1, and No. 10 in B minor) to be scored for four violins and strings (the latter also including a solo part for cello). They are thus in general closer to the concerto grosso than the remaining works, all of which are scored for either one or two violins, with the addition of a cello part in No. 11. Here the solo parts attain a greater degree of the brilliance and flamboyance typically associated with the composer.
