And so it begins: bracing for that first step onto the greased slide through the Crazy House. January 2, where art thou?
To get you in the proper mindset for Thanksgiving, here’s a rarely-heard work by Antonio Vivaldi.
The story goes that it was Igor Stravinsky who quipped that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. Without making claim to having heard all of them, I have to say, they seem to be of uniformly high quality, if in binge-listening they do tend to become a mite indistinguishable. Would “The Four Seasons” ever have gained the traction it has without its programmatic associations?
Anyone familiar with classical music can tell you that concertos and symphonies with nicknames tend to have a better chance of getting played or at the very least remembered.
A few years ago, one of my colleagues was searching through the station’s CD library, when he stumbled across an album titled “Viva Vivaldi: The Unknown Gems” (Centaur Records #3299). From this disc, we were astonished to learn of a certain “Turkey” Concerto, RV 506.
It turns out the canny artists themselves named it such, because of the “fiendish, cascading broken third passages in the solo lines in the 3rd movement.” In any case, it’s a good way to get your disc played. On reflection, why should a nickname bestowed in the 18th century be any more valid?
