Sinfonie e Concerti tra Napoli e Venezia - Accademia del Ricercare

Sinfonie e Concerti tra Napoli e Venezia

Alessandro Scarlatti
 Sinfonia di Concerto Grosso n. 1 in Fa maggiore, 1715
 Per 2 flauti dolci, archi e basso continuo
Allegro, Adagio, Allegro, Adagio, Allegro (tarantella)

Domenico Sarri
 Concerto in la minore
 Per flauto dolce, archi e basso continuo
Largo Staccato e dolce, Allegro, Larghetto, Spiritoso

Antonio Vivaldi
 Concerto in sol minore RV 156
 Per archi e basso continuo
Allegro, Adagio, Allegro

Alessandro Scarlatti
 Sinfonia di Concerto Grosso n. 5 in re minore, 1715
 Per 2 flauti dolci, archi e basso continuo
Spiritoso e staccato, Adagio, Allegro, Adagio, Allegro assai

Niccolò Fiorenza
 Concerto in la minore, 1726
 Per flauto dolce 2 violini e basso continuo
Largo, Allegro, Grave, Allegro

Antonio Vivaldi
 Concerto in Do maggiore RV 533
 Per 2 flauti, archi e basso continuo
Allegro molto, Largo, (Allegro)

 

Esecutori

Lorenzo Cavasanti, Luisa Busca, flauti

Silvia Colli, Francesco Bergamini, violini

Alessandro Curtoni, viola

Antonio Fantinuoli, cello

Maurizio Piantelli, tiorba

Claudia Ferrero, Cembalo

Direttore, Pietro Busca

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The genre of the instrumental concert has two forms: concert solo and concerto grosso. These are characterized by the opposition between one or more solo instruments or a group of instruments, known as the "concertino," and the rest of the orchestral mass. This genre developed in the second half of the seventeenth century and is considered one of the most important and historically relevant achievements of the Italian instrumental Baroque.

Composers such as Arcangelo Corelli, Giuseppe Torelli, and Tomaso Albinoni brought the instrumental concert to an initial culmination of its development. However, the genre evolved until it reached its absolute peak in the work of Antonio Vivaldi. The composers working in Venice played a significant role in this evolution. Still, the contribution of the exponents of the so-called Neapolitan School, particularly its progenitor Alessandro Scarlatti, is also noteworthy. In his Twelve Symphonies of concerto grosso written in 1715, Scarlatti enriched the model established by the Roman composer with an unprecedented concerted sensibility, with a notable refinement in the choices of timbre, and with all the contrapuntal knowledge of which he was the repository.

Both schools, the Venetian and the Neapolitan, consolidated the instrumental concert genre. It was eventually exported outside national borders and evolved to the point of shaping the classical symphonic language, brought to its maximum splendor by the musicians of the First School of Vienna, particularly by Haydn and Mozart.

The concert program documents the development of the concert genre in these two important Italian musical centers. Still, it also bears witness to an incipient interest in the transverse flute (or "traversiere"). This instrument was not as widespread in Italy as the recorder in the first half of the eighteenth century. Four of the concerts proposed by the program are intended for the recorder, while the only one originally conceived for traversiere is the double concert composed by Antonio Vivaldi.

The greater diffusion of the recorder in the Italian peninsula is confirmed by the testimony of Johann Joachim Quantz, flautist at the court of Frederick the Great. He met both Vivaldi and Alessandro Scarlatti during his trip to Italy in 1724. The traversiere aroused the interest of Vivaldi, who dedicated no less than thirteen solo concerts to the instrument. He also composed a double concert, as well as several chamber concerts and concerts to multiple instruments that involve him as a supporting actor. Vivaldi's work for traversiere is, therefore, to be considered pioneering and lays the foundations for an idiomatic use of the instrument to which, until well into the twentieth century, composers repeatedly resorted.