Summer Returns to VoM Sunday Video

The title of today’s video installment (Season 3, Episode 31) in the Sunday Mornings at Ten series of YouTube concerts presented by Voices of Music was Vivaldi in the summer. This referred to the second violin concerto in Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8 publication, whose first four concerts are known collectively as The Four Seasons. Ironically, this concerto had been included in the program for this past July 9, which marked the release of the 100th video in the Sunday Mornings series.

Violinist Cynthia Miller Freivogel performing the solo violin part for the “Summer” concerto in Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons collection of violin concertos

While the music may have been the same, the treatment was different. Each of the four concertos can be classified as program music, where the “program” for each concerto is a sonnet. When all four of these concertos were performed on an American Bach Soloists concert at the end of last month, each concerto was performed by a different violinist; and each violinist provided a brief summary of the content of the poem associated with that concerto. Needless to say, that approach provided more than a little strain on memory; so, as seen above, the Voices of Music video presents the words of the sonnet itself as subtitles providing the line-by-line correspondence with the music. The result was a richer appreciation of the relationship between music, particularly the solo work of Cynthia Miller Freivogel, and words without any strain on memory.

The program began with another Vivaldi concerto, RV 208 in D major, known as the Grosso mogul. It was subsequently transcribed for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach, where it became BWV 594 in C major. However, RV 208 is decidedly different from any of the Opus 8 concertos. Most important is that it allows the soloist the freedom of a cadenza. On the Voices of Music video (which has just been released), soloist Augusta McKay Lodge went to town with that cadenza. This was an extended affair that was positively jaw-dropping. Most significantly, she ventured far and wide from the “home tonality” of D major; and I have to confess that I Iost count of the number of different keys that dominated different passages in her cadenza. (It would not surprise me to learn that she visited all twelve of the major keys, and I am not sure if any of the minor ones were added to the mix.) One has to wonder if Bach was just adventurous in playing his transcription.

RV 208 was followed by an aria from Vivaldi’s RV 736 opera seria Teuzzone, based on a libretto by Apostolo Zeno. The title of the aria is “Per lacerarlo” (tear it apart); and it is sung in the third act of the opera. Curiously, the subtitles provided the Italian text that countertenor Christopher Lowerey was singing. Given my past experiences with seldom-performed Baroque operas (particularly those in Italian), I would suggest that following the text was more useful than trying to figure out how the text related to the overall narrative of the opera!