240. Baroque Concertos

The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Works by Vivaldi and Bach for orchestra and flute solo performed by Gardner Chamber Orchestra, Paula Robison, and Orlando Cela, flute, and John Gibbons, harpsichord on January 17, 1999.

• Vivaldi: Concerto (Sinfonia) in G Major "alla Rustica" RV 151
• Vivaldi: Concerto in C Major RV 533
• Vivaldi: Concerto in G Minor "La Notte" No. 5, F XII
• Vivaldi: Concerto in G Major, Rv 437
• J.S. Bach: Concerto in F Major, BWV 1057

For this podcast, we dug into the archives to resurrect an older recording, of some older music, that we thought you’d like. These concertos breeze by. The first we’ll hear—Vivaldi’s Sinfonia in G Major “alla Rustica”—packs three movements into just four and a half minutes. Then, we get the double flute concerto, with Robison and Cela, in C Major.

Then, things shift a bit, for the flute concerto in G minor, played by Robison solo. Dubbed the “nighttime” concerto in Italian, the piece has a couple of evocatively named movements within it as well: after a fast introduction we get a spooky movement called “phantoms,” followed by another quick stretch, and then a slower, harmonically unsettled bit titled “The Dream”—neither really a fantasy nor a nightmare, but somewhere in between. The piece concludes with another quick movement, with the bassoon taking a starring role.

We wrap up the podcast with another of Vivaldi’s solo flute concertos—in G Major—followed by J.S. Bach’s Concerto in F Major for both flute soloists, harpsichord, and strings.