Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Concerto pour violon en fa majeur, RV 287
Concerto pour deux violon en do majeur, RV 508
Concerto pour deux violon en sol mineur, RV 517
Concerto pour cordes en do majeur, RV 113
Concerto pour violon en sol mineur, RV 321
Concerto pour violon en ré mineur, RV 240
Concerto pour violon en ré majeur, RV 123

Insieme Strumentale di Roma
Giorgio Saso, violon, direction

The seven concertos presented on this CD constitute an anthology of Vivaldi’s repertory for strings in his most preferred forms: the four-part concerto without a solo instrument, the concerto with one or two solo violins. Although the three types of the genre were already well known when Vivaldi began to cultivate them in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the advent of the Red Priest caused an authentic revolution in the repertory both in Italy and abroad. Apart from the sensuous musical substance which characterises them, the main formal novelty of Vivaldi’s concertos consists in the “stellar” arrangement of the solo parts, which in Vivaldi’s works is seen in a hitherto unknown splendour. Thus, making use of the typical form of the ritornello, a thematic nucleus used for the tutti which alternates with solo episodes, Vivaldi raises the soloist to the position of authentic protagonist of the concerto, going beyond the discreet role which the fathers of the genre - Corelli, Torelli and Albinoni among others – had given him at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Although in fact the string concertos without a soloist – called “Concerti Ripieni” by Vivaldi in that they were designed for the “ripieno” – prove to be less spectacular because of the absence of the figure of the soloist, the personality of the Venetian maestro stands out, so much so that it is precisely to Vivaldi that the decisive evolution of the musical genre begun by Torelli in the opera VI of 1698 is attributed, towards more developed forms which connect with the preclassical Sinfonia and the later sonata form, as shown in Vivaldi’s later examples of the genre (Sinfonie RV 149 and 168 concerto 158.