This record is a good example of my impatience. I visited Venice in 2015, and discovered that Vivaldi really fits that city. I also discovered that I didn’t have that much of the Venetian baroque composer. So naturally, I wanted to fill this gap, and I did it with the first one I found. Big mistake. Both recording and performance are not to my taste.
Antonio Vivaldi wrote a very early piece of program music with his series of violin concerto’s. He wrote four concerto’s, each consisting of three parts (slow, fast, slow), on the basis of an equal number sonnets. The author of the sonnets is lost to us (maybe it was the composer himself), but the contents are still known. Details in them are literally put to music: the song of birds, the barking of a dog in the distance.
Violinist Julian Olevsky moved before the war from his native Germany to Argentina, and later to the US. He had a successful career as a violinist and teacher at the University of Massachusetts, before dying of a heart attack at the early age of 59.