Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder (review)

Abstract

Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder. By Federico Maria Sardelli. Translated by Michael Talbot. Burling - ton, VT: Ashgate in association with Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi/ Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2007. [xxii, 336 p. ISBN-10 075463714X; ISBN-13 9780754637141. $99.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographies, references, indexes. book under review is an expanded version of Sardelli's La musica per flauto di Antonio Vivaldi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), translated by one of the most eminent Vivaldi scholars of today, who also contributed some of the additional material. original book constituted a considerable achievement in woodwind scholarship: the first book-length study of Vivaldi's imaginative music for flute and recorder (in Italian, both kinds of flauto) by someone well-versed in the composer's music in general as well as previous research on the subject and possessing an obvious love for the period. main preoccupations of the book were matters of instrumentation, dating, and the players and occasions for which pieces were written. Perhaps the most stimulating section, on Vivaldi's use of the flute and recorder in vocal music, explored virtually uncharted territory. translation retains the book's division into two parts, of disparate length (54, 134 pp.). In part I, The Recorder and Flute in Italy in Vivaldi's Time, Sardelli looks at the social, musical, and organological evidence for the presence of the instruments, both in the country and in Vivaldi's life. This skillfully assembled mass of evidence supports Sardelli's novel reversal of the received scholarly view that, rather than writing for the recorder in the first two or three decades of the eighteenth century, then switching over to the flute, Vivaldi already preferred the flute in the 1710s and did not start writing for the recorder until the early 1720s. In part II, on the music, Sardelli devotes chapters to the sonatas, chamber concertos, flute concertos, recorder concertos, concertos for flautino, concerto for two flutes, concertos with multiple soloists and orchestra, and finally vocal music. I was especially taken by his evidence and arguments that Vivaldi himself taught the flute and had an insider's view of the technique of both instruments. section showing how Vivaldi reworked the C minor recorder concerto from the violin concerto, RV 202, blends musicological and practical considerations in a masterly way. Sardelli has had two particular advantages in his research. first is a special kind of bibliographical control: my own, still unpublished, catalogue of Vivaldi's selfquotations- a massive accumulation . . . which I hope will appear in print before long (pp. xvi-xvii). book is living proof of Sardelli's opinion that critical analysis of the dense network of borrowings, reworkings and quotations that pervade the entire output of the composer can play its part . . . in establishing more firmly the chronology and filiation of the sources (p. xvii). Second, Sardelli has had private access to Peter Ryom's forthcoming large and complete version (Grosse Ausgabe) of his monumental catalogue, the Verzeichnis der Werke Antonio Vivaldis, which is soon to appear from Breitkopf & Hartel (p. xvii). translator, Michael Talbot, of course knows Italian well, and in general he has achieved his goal of producing a text that reads . . . as if it had been written from the start in English (p. xx). In passing, I did come across one puzzling passage: a reference to the Concerto di flauti by Alessandro Marcello, which the translation claims must have been conceived for the enjoyment of a small group of amateurs who, it appears, were still playing the obsolescent recorder 'consort-style' in all its sizes from descant to bass well into the eighteenth century (p. 19). Of course, the recorder was not yet obsolescent. What the original Italian says is l'intera e pur obsolescente famiglia dei flauti dritti (p. …