New Discoveries of Vivaldi, a little video!

We have made a little video to present our new and exciting program: New Discoveries of Vivaldi. The program features two new discoveries of Vivaldi’s music and the most recent findings of Vivaldi’s works for violin and continuo.

Although we made the video fun and with a lot of humor sense, the video is quite geek and features a lot of new and well informed facts about the pieces and the research involved. Let’s see some of them!

1:23 – How the research was done – The analysis of the internal features of the sources such as paper, watermarks and copyist is followed by an analysis of the music. This musical analysis is mostly based in the a new research method developed by Federico Maria Sardelli (Catalogo delle concordanze musicali vivaldiane, 2012), it is based in the recognition and analysis of concordances. In a few words, these concordances are blocks of musical material (a little musical idea or a big passage) that Vivaldi re-uses in his works.

The analysis of these concordances had been used as a tool to assure the vivaldian paternity of other works such as the violin sonata RV 810.

1:38 – Vivaldi speaks – It is great to have Vivaldi himself speaking about his own pieces! And he gives us a lot of musicological information.

The RV 820 – It is now the earliest work known by Antonio Lucio Vivaldi. An analysis of the watermark and the date of the paper has shown that the piece was copied in Ansbach. This fact links Vivaldi and Torelli. The vivaldian scholars were not sure if Vivaldi studied with Torelli, but thanks to this discovering now the relationship is clear and we know a little bit more about the study years of Vivaldi.

1:50 – The influence of other composers it is shown in these early years, it is possible to see the great influence of Corelli in this work, it is remarkable the material taken from Corelli’s op. V, third sonata.

2:07 – The Sonata in A major for violin and continuo features a very strong concordance with other vivaldian work, which is the use of the second movement of the violin concerto RV 205 as opening movement of the sonata. In addition more than fifty concordances have been found in the sonata.

2:22 – Vivaldi speaks about Pisendel – Pisendel is the copyist of these sonatas. He was pupil and a good friend of Vivaldi. Johann Adam Hiller tell us about the travel of Pisendel to Venice and his encounter with Vivaldi. (Hiller, Johann Adam, Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen, die Musik betreffend, Volumen 1 Verlag der Zeitungs-Expedition, 1766, p.287).

Hiller speaks about two nice anecdotes, one is about how Pisendel played together with Vivaldi and the other was about an encounter with the police in Venice. It seems that the secret police of Venice mistook Pisendel for a criminal!

Other geek facts: Vivaldi’s profile picture in Skype. It seems that the well known portrait of Vivaldi (Anonymous painter and found at Civico Museo Bibliografico in Bologne) was not really Vivaldi. The picture shown in the video is from an Anonymous painter of Milano. Recent studies point to this portrait as the authentic Antonio Lucio Vivaldi. It is possible to read more on the studies by François Farges and Michel Ducastel -Delacroix.