Word: vivaldi
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...transcription of Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor proved disappointing. I have always felt that an orchestral arrangement of chamber music should utilize the full orchestral sonorities. If the arrangement is merely an attempt to approximate the original sound of the piece, we have a right to ask for the original instrumentation instead. A transcription, I believe, is valid only if it expresses the music in a new way. Thursday's rendition failed because it was little more than a muddy caricature of the real thing. The performance, however, was reasonably good. Stanger's directing lacked excitement because...
...program includes the Schubert Symphony in B flat Major, No. 5, Vivaldi Concerto Grosso in D Minor...
Last week Manhattan concertgoers heard their first Vivaldi opera, performed by Thomas Scherman, his Little Orchestra (TIME, April 30, 1951) and soloists. Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes in the Apocrypha, was a delight to the ear throughout, if a little difficult to imagine as opera...
Listeners used to the blood & thunder accompaniments of Verdi, for instance, found Vivaldi's music often "lively as gunfire," but hardly theatrical. Holofernes got his head lopped off in a few bars of refined fiddling-where Verdi would have unleashed all the brass and tympani in the pit. And Judith was always genteel, a decapitator in old lace. Sung in Latin, the vocal lines were always elegant, sometimes floridly difficult...
...Vivaldi, master violinist that he was, proved again that he wrote more beautifully for strings than any of his contemporaries, e.g., Bach and Handel. And his music is permeated with a sunny warmth unequaled by his northern competitors. The Herald Tribunes Virgil Thomson ended his review with a burst of continental enthusiasm. "Evviva Vivaldi! And let's have more of him." There is plenty more to hear, and the Vivaldi boom shows every sign of settling down into a thorough, long-range revival...