Vivaldi: Concerti per flauto

"The music of Antonio Vivaldi radiates vital energy, celebrates affective states at their most intimate, artfully mimics natural phenomena, and tells stories full of blazing colours, heady fragrances, humour, imagination, exuberance, tenderness, and melancholy. It is a joy, a challenge and a privilege for me, after many Vivaldian experiences on the concert platform, to present this music on record. Fortunately for us, Vivaldi left us a magnificent repertory not only for violin, but also for the recorder. In addition to using it in many other musical genres, he called on the 'flauto' as a soloist in different timbral groupings and instrumental combinations in some twenty concertos, and raised the instrument and its expression to a new dimension. I would like to present the concerti per flauto in their original scoring for wind and orchestra, a brilliant ensemble concerto (concerto con molti stromenti) and an effervescent flautino concerto as I think they were conceived and may have sounded three hundred years ago. But I also wanted to try something new, and so I arranged for the flauto, a late work of Vivaldi, the Violin Concerto RV 375, which represents the new galant, singing style, no longer designed for the clear articulation of the recorder. Some arpeggios have been modified by analogy with the typical idiom of the maestro's writing for recorder, and the upward transposition of a fourth makes the work sound warm and ethereal in the key of E flat major. Here the solo diva illuminates all the rich invention that is implied and expressed in Vivaldi's late style. What hidden treasures for the recorder lie hidden in these late works; what a pity that Vivaldi himself did not want to bring them out; but how lucky we are that the music of the Prete Rosso has so much to offer us! Grazie, Signor Vivaldi!" Maurice Steger