NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

VIVALDI Gloria in D Major, RV589

When the modern-day Vivaldi revival began early in the twentieth century, attention focused mainly on the composer's concertos.  Those were particularly interesting to scholars and musicians because of their influence on J. S. Bach.  But then, in the late 1920's their view of Vivaldi changed, when a large collection of his vocal music was discovered in Turin.  Suddenly, he was much more than a composer of violin concertos.  The Gloria, part of that Turin collection, received its twentieth-century premiere in 1930 and has remained the most popular of all Vivaldi's vocal works ever since.  

In addition to concertos, Vivaldi was asked to write a good deal of religious music for the accomplished musicians at the Ospedale della Pietà, the girls' orphanage in Venice where he served as music director.  In all likelihood, the present Gloria, in which all the vocal solos are for female voices, was written for the girls at the school.  It is a setting of a single section of a mass, but it is almost certainly a complete work and not a fragment, since it was not uncommon to write individual mass movements for specific occasions.  

The orchestration, which may have been inspired by the roster of students at the school, calls for relatively limited forces -- only a single oboe and a single trumpet (with no timpani) are added to the strings --  and there are only three vocal soloists.  The work opens with the kind of strong motoric rhythm that is reminiscent of Vivaldi's concertos but then shifts into the beautiful harmonic world of the Et in terra pax, a movement that wanders meditatively through unexpected keys.  

The closing fugue (Cum sancto spiritu) is in a more conservative style than the rest of the work and is in fact not originally by Vivaldi.  He "borrowed" it from a work by a contemporary, Giovanni Maria Ruggieri.  Here Vivaldi has considerably improved the original, altering the orchestration, giving a greater role to the trumpet, and condensing Ruggieri's double chorus to a single four-voice chorus.  The Ruggieri fugue may be an unexpected choice for the ending of this work, but Vivaldi seems to have been so impressed with it that this was the second time that he used it. The first was a rather different adaptation in one of his earlier works, which was also a setting of the Gloria.

-Program Notes by Boston Baroque

MOZART Vesperae solennes de confessore, K.339

The Vesperae solennes de confessore (Solemn Confessional Vespers) of 1780 was the last sacred work that Mozart wrote for Salzburg and his much disliked employer there, the tyrannical Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo. In accordance with the Archbishop’s requirement that the music for liturgical services in Salzburg be relatively simple and brief, Mozart wrote a compact work, full of color and variety. Vespers is an evening service, belonging to a liturgical cycle keyed to the hours of the day and prescribing specific psalm texts that vary according to the church calendar. Here, as the title indicates, Mozart set the psalms for use on the feast day of a confessor, a saint who suffered persecution for the Faith. Thus, this music was composed for use on a particular saint’s day, and undoubtedly Mozart indicated which one, but no specific information still exists about the circumstances surrounding the work’s composition or first performance. Because Archbishop Colloredo required Mozart to write concisely, the psalms and the Magnificat are not set verse by verse with separate arias, ensembles, and choruses, but rather composed in continuous movements. The high points of the work are the fugal Laudate pueri and the beautiful soprano solo in the Laudate Dominum. 

—Program notes © Susan Halpern

MOZART Requiem in D minor, K.626
Edited and revised by Richard Maunder

When Mozart died in 1791, he left unfinished the score of his Requiem. At the request of his widow, the work was completed by Mozart's pupil and assistant, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Unfortunately, Süssmayr was a musician of limited technique and ability--his poor orchestration has frequently been criticized, and considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether the movements missing from Mozart's autograph were entirely Süssmayr's work, or whether he might have based them on Mozart's sketches or oral instructions. Richard Maunder, who after many years' research recently completed this new edition of the Requiem, attempted to be more faithful to Mozart's original intentions. He concluded that Süssmayr probably did write the disputed movements, but may have used a now-lost Mozart sketch in composing the Agnus Dei .