Vivaldi red priest

This week, a rightly classic performance from the great countertenor Andreas Scholl with
The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra.

[23 mins]

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Vivaldi’s works were already going out of fashion in Venice well before he died in 1741, and for the next two centuries he seems to have been remembered — except in a small handful of historical studies — just for a few violin concertos.

And even those who knew a bit more about the range of his instrumental music music seem to have been ignorant of (or at least very much downplayed) Vivaldi’s religious and secular vocal music.

It wasn’t until about 1930, and after some detective work, that the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin acquired a large collection of Vivaldi’s music that had been bought by the Austrian ambassador to Venice in the second half of the eighteenth century and then split and passed down through two branches of his descendants.

And there re-emerged such central masterpieces as the Gloria RV 589, the Stabat Mater