Hommage à Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi, one of the greatest masters of the High Baroque, died in Vienna on 28 July 1741, aged 63 – only ten months after arriving in the venerable capital of the Habsburg Empire. Probably because of the sudden death of Emperor Charles VI, he was given no appointment at court, and other potential employers turned him down as well: by 1730 the High Baroque was already fading. The inglorious end of a glorious artist and virtuoso came quietly, in the streets of a city whose musical life was already marked by the spirit of the pre-classical era.

But what if events had taken a different turn at one of the countless crossroads of his life? The concert goes back to 1715. Vivaldi was then working as maestro di viola all’inglese at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, an orphanage for girls famous for its musical excellence. In Vienna, Johann Joseph Fux, until then Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, moved to the imperial court; his post went to Georg Reutter the Elder. What if the 37-year-old “prete rosso”, the red-haired priest Antonio Vivaldi, had become Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s instead?

The Bach Consort Wien under Rubén Dubrovsky dares an equally speculative answer to this highly hypothetical question – with mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux and the Wiener Kammerchor, in a splendid and freely invented showpiece of sacred representative art, as it might have taken place had history run a different course.