Now let's look at one of the most famous of the composers from the Baroque Period.
We really have sort of the three big names; Bach,
Handle, and Vivaldi and in this segment we're going to look at Vivaldi.
So Antonio Vivaldi
was an Italian priest.
So what's he doing composing music? Well, he was a priest but most of his job was
actually working at
basically an orphanage for girls, and so he taught
their choir class and he did all the things that had to do with music at this
girl's school.
So even though he was a priest, most of his job
was sort of on the teaching side of things so he's in a different
kind of
world basically.
We call him the red priest because he was famous for his red hair,
so if you hear people talk about the red priest, that's where it comes from.
There's actually a really interesting Baroque ensemble that calls themself
Red Priest, so if you have a chance to see them, I recommend that highly. They're
very entertaining.
Now, he wrote
hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music,
many of them instrumental.
He wrote, I think something like four hundred of the same kind of piece.
And some people would say he wrote the same piece four hundred times.
Now, this is a period of time where composers were always borrowing from themselves. If
they wrote something they really liked then they didn't have a bit of problem
taking that same theme and using it somewhere else.
It's not plagiarism, it's your own piece. They even borrowed from each other and they really didn't care.
It was flattering.
So, a lot of his pieces do have a similar sort of sound but remember that he's also
working with a fairly limited tonal palette compared to what we're used to
hearing so
we can forgive him a little for that.
But the piece that he's most famous for is actually a set of pieces called "The
Four Seasons."
Obviously
summer, spring, winter, fall we've got our four seasons here. So,
these particular pieces
are a genre that we call
concerto
grosso or if we are talking about the plural we would fancifully say concerti grossi.
So, what is a concerto grosso?
In concerto grosso
you have
a large group
but we are in the Baroque era so large is relative. We're really only talking
about maybe thirty or forty people in the orchestra, but you have
your larger ensemble.
And then instead of having a soloist who is the big star you have a small group of
soloists.
In this case it's like a little string quartet that's within
the orchestra. We wouldn't call them a string quartet because that's a
free-standing ensemble that doesn't even exist in the Baroque Period,
but you get the idea.
So you would have
this larger group
which we called a ripieno (you don't have to remember that)
and then the smaller group
that plays the
more embellished and fancy stuff. This is a period of time where we really
have the first of our virtuoso
performers.
People are really really exceptionally talented on their instruments and who can
play practically anything that you could do with the instrument.
So these pieces were a way to showcase
those kinds of talents.
So, they were popular for performers and we like to listen to
them as well.
So we're going to listen to the first movement of the spring
set of concerti.
So.. as I said, this is a set of four, so each one actually has
three movements. So we had a total of twelve movements,
and sometimes you will get to hear the entire set in a performance.
A lot of times we just get one season at a time and right now we're just
getting one piece of one season.
So we're going to listen to the first movement
from the spring concerto.
This is an allegro and it's in rondo form.
So as we listen to it, I'm just going to pretty much let it run the first time
and then we'll go back and we'll talk about where the different segments are.
But what I'd like you to watch
as you listen to this piece
is the performers because you can see that sometimes
there are
like three or four people who are the only ones playing,
and then everybody plays. That's the concerto part, concerto means together, concerted.
It means together; so that's the concerto part.
The grosso means big,
so that distinguishes it from the later concerto that we will see which will have
a soloist instead of a group.
But we have a group and then we have our little solo, soli
group that will be playing so watch the players because it's hard to hear
this when you listen to a recording
but you can see it very clearly on the video so that's important. So here is our first
movement of Vivaldi "Four
Seasons: The Spring."
And our major soloist here is Isaac Stern who is one of the world's great violinists.
So as I said this is a really good example
of rondo form we had that don don ta ta don ta ta don ta don don
don don ta ta don ta ta don ta don don That little theme,
that's our A and we hear it several times at the beginning as we normally do
in a rondo so that we can be sure
that we know what's happening. So as we listen this time,
let's... we'll stop each that time we have a new section of the form so you can
listen for that rondo part
(music playing)
K, this is the beginning our B section.
This is the section where we have just the soloist playing. We have a lot of
ornamentation which is something very
much used in the Baroque Period, all of these toodlee, toodlee, toodleeoots.
All those little decorative trills, attachments to the melody,
very much Baroque style.
(music playing)
Here comes our A section. It gets really obvious when it starts.
It's always the whole orchestra coming back in and you know this theme so well
it's not a problem to find it.
(music playing)
In fact we know it so well
now that we just get a little truncated version of it. So that was all we're going to
get of A this time.
Now we're into C. So, very different from our twiddly twiddly bit that we had for
our B section.
(music playing)
Here it comes again!
(music playing)
That time it's even shorter. He knows we know and we don't have to have it over and
over again.
Very dramatic difference section here so now we're at letter D.
(music playing)
Here's A again!
(music playing)
OK, what do we have here? This is a new section. It's obviously not A
anymore. But it doesn't sound completely new. That's because it's a lot like
B at the beginning so you might describe this as a B
sort of altered, or we could call it E and just say it's something...
that it might be different enough to be called something new.
(music playing)
And then one more time,
A comes back because we need our closure. So this is a fairly long rondo. The piece
itself is not that long,
But he does incorporate a lot of sections, but by being able to
shorten up those A's when they come around at later times, he can do that.
So, this is an important work because it's a good example of concerto grosso for you.
But it's also a really kind of advanced work for its time.
This was written in the 1700's. He's got a title,
"Spring." He's given it a name that's descriptive.
We won't see that again for almost 150 years.
So he's really ahead of his time here and what he was trying to do with each of
these concerti
was to really to give us a sense of that season, what it might sound like.
So if you think about this piece and spring, you know he's got bird-like
sounds, all those little twittery twittery
things sound like birds. He's got a thunderstorm - ddrrdddrrrddrr -
part so, you know, thunderstorms are very spring!
After the thunderstorm, the birds come back out. So he's actually telling us a
story
through this rondo and that's a very advanced thing to be doing in
Vivaldi's time. So, what we need to remember, that this is a concerto
grosso which means that we have a group of soloists,
and then we also have some instruments that accompany them. It's important
because it's
way ahead of its time in terms of its... trying to represent something in music,
not just music because of the beauty of it,
and that is one of many many many concerti
that Vivaldi wrote.