----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael J. Smith" <mjs at smithbowen.net>
> On Aug 30, 2011, at 1:38 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> We should be deeply grateful to Vivaldi for lightening up Bach's music.
Bach's fondness for Vivaldi -- that odious tweedler -- is a great puzzle to me.
There *is* some good Vivaldi -- the little solo cantatas, for example. But all the orchestral stuff is awful.
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No, not true. Is true he had to grind a lot of stuff out. He was the (very happy) musical director of a girl's orphanage in Venice. He composed music for them to play to support themselves.
He has some really beautiful oboe concertos. And a lot of beautiful other stuff too.
A lot of the "tweedle" is in how he is played. This is generally true with baroque music and Haydn's symphonic music, which is played very, very badly. I used to think all of Haydn's symphonies were total hack work. Then I heard one live, played by an orchestra who cared, on original instruments in a church in Berkeley, and I cried for a good twenty minutes. There were layers and layers and layers of stuff in there I had no idea existed in Haydn's music.
Joanna