Allegro – Andante – Allegro – Allegro Molto

While working for the all-girls orphanage, Ospedale della Pietà, Vivaldi was contracted to compose two concertos each month making him the most prolific concerto composer of the era, completing more than 500, almost half for violin. The popularity of opera attracted him to diversify his career in 1713, and while he wasn’t as successful in the field as some peers, he claimed to have composed 94 operas, of which 46 scores exist, including the later L’Olimpiade 1733. Vivaldi’s score was the second of some sixty settings of the three-act libretto by Pietro Metastasio.

II. Adagio

Alessandro Marcello was a Venetian of wealthy nobility who enjoyed composing, often under the pseudonym Eterio Stinfalico. In 1713-1714, J.S. Bach transcribed several Italianate concertos for harpsichord and organ, and while most were by Vivaldi, others were included as well, including the D minor Oboe Concerto which has since been ascribed to Alessandro Marcello. 

IV. Fandango

Luigi Boccherini was an Italian Classical-era cello virtuoso and composer who spent most of his life in Madrid where his light and optimistic galant style was colored by local tastes rather than the fashions of other European intellectual and artistic cities. Influenced greatly by Haydn, he composed more than 200 string quartets and quintets that helped elevate the musical role of the cellist. A late-in-life commission from the Marquis de Benavent saw the transcription of earlier works into several guitar quintets. The most famous of the group was No. 4 in D major, which concludes with Spanish flair in a dancing Fandango.

V. Chaconne 

Bach’s contribution to the growing solo violin repertoire was a series of six sonatas and partitas, composed in 1720 while serving as Kapellmeister in Köthen. It is unknown if they were performed in his lifetime, and the pieces were not published until 1805. Even so, they remained obscure until they were championed by Joseph Hoachim later in the century, ensconcing them in the repertoire.

The Second Partita’s final movement, the Chaconne, stands out as the most popular excerpt from the collection and is regarded as one of the most monumental contributions to the instrument’s repertoire. The soloist is responsible for a simple repeated bass line, from which a series of complex variations are spun.

1. Larghetto affettuoso 
2. Allegro 
3. Largo e piano 
4. Allegro

The Venetian three-movement concerto model popularized by Vivaldi had taken hold on the continent, but Handel was more familiar with the four-movement model championed by Corelli that was popular during his Italian stint in 1706-10. Handel spent most of his career in England, long enough to introduce audiences to Italian opera, profit from its massive success, and witness its decline in the late 1730s. He shrewdly turned to—in fact, invented—the English Oratorio, for which he often included newly composed concertos to appear variously throughout performances. Most of the twelve concerti grossi were included throughout the 1739-40 season, with a limited first publishing in 1739, and a larger run in 1741 where it arbitrarily gained the Opus 6 moniker, after Corelli’s popular Opus 6 group of twelve concerti grossi. The comparison may have been a marketing ploy, but also matched Handel’s desire to contribute his masterful voice to the orchestral repertoire.

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) was a major figure in the Italian Baroque, credited for his work in establishing the prominence of the violin and developing modern tonal theory, and also played mentor to a key player in the next generation of musical thinkers, Francesco Geminiani. Among Corelli’s dozens of published sonatas is the final installment of his Opus 5, a set of 23 variations on a common melody, La Folia. Geminiani continued to develop the writing for and performance of the violin with several concertos and a 1751 treatise, Art of Playing on the Violin. He dedicated his Op. 5 to a transcription of Corelli’s Op. 5, expanding it from a trio sonata to the growing orchestral forces of the concerto grosso.

Jean-Philippe Rameau was the most significant figure of the French Baroque, and committed his final three decades to opera, with more than 30 contributions to the genre. He died during the rehearsals of his five-act lyric tragedy Les Boréades, which has a libretto concerning the Greek myth of Abaris the Hyperborean. Les artères et les heures (“The Arts and the Hours”) was entrance music for the Polymnie, the muse of sacred poetry, arranged and titled as such by pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.

The various keyboard suites in the 1733 publishing titled Suites de Pièces are a compilation of various works Handel composed before 1717, and movements are often unrelated. The Minuet in question was published in conjunction with the first suite in the volume, added at the end. The Minuet also appears in his earlier Flute sonata in E minor HWV 375, published in 1730.

With some one thousand works for the lute, Sylvius Leopold Weiss was the most important contributor to the instrument’s repertoire in the eighteenth century and was celebrated as the most skillful lutenist of his time. His D minor Passacaglia features a repeated bass line with a melody that develops in complexity.

Act I – Prelude 
Hornpipe 
Rondeau

The most significant composers working in England in the eighteenth century tended to be continental imports like Handel, but the seventeenth century was abuzz with English-born composers like Henry Purcell, who is remembered for his remarkable early contributions to English opera and theater music. The Fairy Queen was composed toward the end of Purcell’s tragically short life and included musical vignettes meant to accompany Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This practice of adding music and scenes to existing plays was common in England at the time, and here, Purcell’s scenes focus on love and marriage with inferences to joint monarchs William and Mary. The work included an orchestral suite that introduced the first act.

Masque. Curtain tune on a Ground 

The 1694 revival of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens included orchestral and vocal music provided by Purcell. The work concludes with the Curtain tune on a Ground, in which much like a chaconne, a melodic bass line is repeated with orchestral elaborations.

While most of Vivaldi’s concertos were composed for violinists of the Ospedale della Pietà, his only concerto for the lute was composed in the 1730s for Count Johann Joseph von Wrtby. 

Vivaldi uses the common ritornello form for the opening Allegro where an introductory orchestral statement returns after soloistic digressions. Here, the lute’s high register presents melodic and arpeggiated figures, contrasting with a minor mode. The central Largo features a pastoral, improvisatory melody, supported by humming violins. The finale is a delightfully melodic and energetic gigue.