Sunday Classics preview: Baroque composers, like musicians before and since, had it bad for Italy, Part 2

"Under the stars of Italy, in that warm air without breezes": the image conjured by the mezzo-soprano soloist in her "strophes" evoking the "first declarations, first vows of two lovers" in Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette

by Ken

After a look back at my earlier Vivaldi Four Seasons post, in last night's preview we refreshed our aural recollection of the music coming out of Italy in the Baroque period, music that enflamed the musical imagination of the rest of Europe, with what seemed to me an appropriate nod to J. S. Bach, a known admirer of Italian music in general and Vivaldi's music in particular.

A concerto by another composer pops immediately to mind, but unfortunatley I can't offer you the recording I would have liked to, the one that made me fall in love with the piece via the first LP I owned devoted to the composer. It was an early Musical Heritage Society LP, and I don't know what happened to my copy. However, by some curious (if not actually perverse) chance, after it went missing, I found another MHS LP -- probably in a dollar record bin somewhere -- devoted to this same composer, which included my beloved concerto (if memory serves, the only work duplicated between the two discs), in a performance I don't like as well as "mine" (we'll hear it tomorrow anyway -- sometimes you just have to go with what you've got).

Ironically, though, this "replacement" LP contains a tiny concerto for four violins -- that's four violins and nothing else) -- that I quite love too.

[0:00] i. Grave
[1:09] ii. Allegro
[2:57] iii. Largo e staccato
[4:48] iv. Allegro

This little concerto is presented again, with proper identifications, in the click-through. Before going there, though, I thought we would throw in another mystery concerto, this one for organ.

i. Andante allegro

[0:00] ii. Larghetto
[4:27] iii. Allegro moderato

TO LEARN THE IDENTITY OF OUR MYSTERY COMPOSERS AND CONCERTOS, AND HEAR SOME MORE MUSIC, CLICK HERE

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