Works

• Vivaldi: Cello Concerto in B minor, RV424
• Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin & Cello in B flat minor, RV 547
• Vivaldi: Concerto for Violin & Viola da gamba, 'La maggiore' RV546
• Vivaldi: Concerto in E minor, RV 278
• Vivaldi: Flute Concerto, Op. 10 No. 2 in G minor, RV 439 'La notte'
• Vivaldi: Oboe Concerto in A minor, RV461

Conductors

• Barshai, Rudolf
• Markiz, Lev

Groups & Artists

• Moscow Chamber Orchestra

Firma Melodiya presents a recording of instrumental concertos by Antonio Vivaldi.

The Italian composer went down in history as an outstanding master of baroque concerto. His legacy includes over 500 concertos (about half of them composed for violin), which combine composing and virtuosic mastership with a truly Italian temperament, strict orderliness of the whole with inexhaustible inspiration and ingenuity. Vivaldi adopted a three-movement model of concerto, but even his most conventionally built works almost always conceal a surprise – an unusual structure of a movement, sudden modulation, a striking harmonic turn, and play of Forte and Piano shades. Just as it was the case with Bach, Vivaldi was sunk into oblivion for almost two centuries, and only in the 20th century his music came out to the foreground of world culture.

Antonio Vivaldi’s concertos are performed by the prominent representatives of domestic music art Oleg Kagan (violin), Natalia Gutman (cello), Evgeny Nepalo (oboe) and Albert Gofman (flute), and conducted by Rudolf Barshai and Lev Markiz, who opened the style of chamber performance of baroque music for the Soviet audience. The Night concerto features an ensemble of soloists of the Moscow Philharmonic Society led by David Oistrakh.