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Tonight’s concert consists mainly of concertos written during the first half of the 18th
century, a golden age for music featuring orchestral strings plus continuo. Of the five
concertos on the programme, the earliest to have been composed is undoubtedly the
Concerto Grosso in D major, Op. 6 no. 4, by the Rome-based composer Arcangelo
Corelli (1653–1713), which was published in the year after his death. The ‘Grosso’
(meaning ‘Grand’) part of the title refers to the main part of the orchestra comprising
parts for two violins, viola, cello and continuo, which is complemented by an
ensemble of soloists formed by two violins, cello and a potentially separate continuo.
The solo instruments play continuously, and the main orchestra reinforces them at
chosen points or, on occasion, dialogues with them. This concerto has four
movements (or more, if one counts every change of tempo as a change of movement).
Corelli’s concertos were enormously admired in their day and were nowhere
in Europe more appreciated, or longer lasting in the repertory, than in Britain and
Ireland. They display to perfection the qualities of classic poise and beauty of sound.

The most important immediate successor of Corelli in Italy was the Venetian
violinist Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), who popularized the reduction of the
movements in a concerto to three (Fast–Slow–Fast) and composed concertos for an
enormous number of solo instruments, naturally above all his own. But a large group
among his concertos, including the piece heard tonight, dispenses with a soloist
altogether and instead develops the music in a symphonic manner while preserving
the vivacity and pathos associated with the concerto genre. This particular concerto,
allotted the number RV 158 in the standard catalogue of Vivaldi’s 800-odd works,
comes from very late in his life and anticipates in a few details the classical style of
Haydn and Mozart.

The typical structure and character of a Vivaldi violin concerto is imitated
very closely in a superb concerto by the Swiss-born composer Johann Friedrich
Schreivogel, who between 1707 and 1749 was a leading violinist in the ducal
orchestra at Milan. During the carnival season of 1716–17 Schreivogel was in Venice,
doubtless playing in one of its opera orchestras, where he met the German violin
virtuoso Johann Georg Pisendel, a pupil and friend of Vivaldi. Pisendel was an
assiduous copyist of the music he encountered in Italy and took back to his home city
of Dresden copies of three of Schreivogel’s violin concertos. To my knowledge, its
performance tonight is the modern world premiere of the D-minor concerto, which it
has been my pleasure to edit.

The remaining two concertos both come from Handel’s Twelve Grand
Concertos, written in 1739 and published in 1740. Handel was a very competitive
composer, who did not like to be upstaged in any musical genre. In 1732 his Italian
rival, the violinist Francesco Geminiani, had published two sets of Corelli-like
concertos much liked by the public, and Handel’s set of twelve can be seen as a
riposte aiming – in the event, successfully – to reassert his own dominance in this
area. Although the ensemble required by Handel is exactly the same as that used by
Corelli, he treats it with much more variety and freedom. In the first, G-major,
concerto, which has five movements, the most memorable movements are the third,
an achingly beautiful interlude in E minor, and the chirpy fugue that follows it. The
second concerto played, no. 7 in B-flat major, has no solo parts at all. Among its five
movements the highlights are the second, a fugue based on a humorous subject that is
essentially an accelerating monotone, and the last, a heavily syncopated hornpipe. A
contemporary report mentioned how Handel used this movement as a test-piece for
violinists he auditioned for his orchestras – and one can see why!

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Light relief from concertos is offered by a set of four movements from the
comedy-ballet “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme” (1669) that Jean-Baptiste Lully
(1632–1687) wrote in collaboration with Molière. The subject of the comedy is a
merchant, Monsieur Jourdain, who after coming into wealth decides to adopt the
lifestyle of a nobleman. His problem is that he does not know exactly how to do this,
with the result that his visitors and attendants play a series of tricks on him. Lully,
who single-handedly created French opera from scratch, is absolutely in his element
with musical satire. But the strange thing is that even at his most intentionally
grotesque, Lully cannot avoid creating something beautiful.

Notes by Michael Talbot © 2026