PROGRAM NOTES Antonio Vivaldi Piccolo Concerto in C Major, RV
PROGRAM NOTES Antonio Vivaldi Born March 4, 1678, Venice, Italy. Died July 28, 1741, Vienna, Austria. Piccolo Concerto in C Major, RV 443 Details regarding the composition and first performance of this concerto are unknown. The concerto is scored for piccolo and string orchestra with harpsichord. Performance time is approximately twelve minutes. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first performance of Vivaldi's Piccolo Concerto, RV 443 was given on a special June Festival concert at Orchestra Hall on June 9, 1966, with Walfrid Kujala as soloist and Antonio Janigro conducting. Our only previous subscription concert performances of this concerto were given on May 6, 7, and 8, 1982, also with Kujala and with Sir Georg Solti conducting. The Orchestra first performed this work at the Ravinia Festival on July 13, 1969, under Antonio Janigro, and most recently on August 11, 1973, under Lawrence Foster, with Kujala as soloist on both occasions. A 1966 performance of Vivaldi's C major piccolo concerto with Walfrid Kujala as soloist and Antonio Janigro conducting is included in From the Archives, vol. 21. The most original, popular, and influential Italian composer of his time, Vivaldi was very quickly forgotten. Within a hundred years of his death, he had achieved the ultimate fate of most composers—complete oblivion. After he was finally rediscovered in the early twentieth century, and eventually became one of the most performed of all composers again, he often was written off as excessively prolific and facile. Stravinsky famously dismissed his entire career as "the same concerto four hundred times," an assessment that was not just unkind, but also unfair.
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