Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder (review)

The book under review is an expanded English version of Sardelli's La musica per flauto di Antonio Vivaldi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), translated by one of the most eminent Vivaldi scholars of today, who also contributed some of the additional material. The original book constituted a considerable achievement in woodwind scholarship: the first book-length study of Vivaldi's imaginative music for flute and recorder (in Italian, both kinds of flauto) by someone well-versed in the composer's music in general as well as previous research on the subject and possessing an obvious love for the period. The main preoccupations of the book were matters of instrumentation, dating, and the players and occasions for which pieces were written. Perhaps the most stimulating section, on Vivaldi's use of the flute and recorder in vocal music, explored virtually uncharted territory.

The translation retains the book's division into two parts, of disparate length (54, 134 pp.). In part I, "The Recorder and Flute in Italy in Vivaldi's Time," Sardelli looks at the social, musical, and organological evidence for the presence of the instruments, both in the country and in Vivaldi's life. This skillfully assembled mass of evidence supports Sardelli's novel reversal of the received scholarly view that, rather than writing for the recorder in the first two or three decades of the eighteenth century, then switching over to the flute, Vivaldi already preferred the flute in the 1710s and did not start writing for the recorder until the early 1720s. In part II, on the music, Sardelli devotes chapters to the sonatas, chamber concertos, flute concertos, recorder concertos, concertos for flautino, concerto for two flutes, concertos with multiple soloists and orchestra, and finally vocal music. I was especially taken by his evidence and arguments that Vivaldi himself taught the flute and had an insider's view of the technique of both instruments. The section showing how Vivaldi reworked the C minor recorder concerto from the violin concerto, RV 202, blends musicological and practical considerations in a masterly way.

Sardelli has had two particular advantages in his research. The first is a special kind of bibliographical control: "my own, still unpublished, catalogue of Vivaldi's self-quotations—a massive accumulation ... which I hope will appear in print before long" (pp. xvi–xvii). The book is living proof of Sardelli's opinion that "critical analysis of the dense network of borrowings, reworkings and quotations that pervade the entire output of the composer can play its part ... in establishing more firmly the chronology and filiation of the sources" (p. xvii). Second, Sardelli has had private access to Peter Ryom's forthcoming "large and complete version (Grosse Ausgabe) of his monumental catalogue, the Verzeichnis der Werke Antonio Vivaldis, which is soon to appear from Breitkopf & Härtel" (p. xvii).

The translator, Michael Talbot, of course knows Italian well, and in general he has achieved his goal of "producing a text that reads ... as if it had been written from the start in English" (p. xx). In passing, I did come across one puzzling passage: a reference to the Concerto di flauti by Alessandro Marcello, which the translation claims "must have been conceived for the enjoyment of a small group of amateurs who, it appears, were still playing the obsolescent recorder 'consort-style' in all its sizes from descant to bass well into the eighteenth century" (p. 19). Of course, the recorder was not yet obsolescent. What the original Italian says is "l'intera e pur obsolescente famiglia dei flauti dritti" (p. 8): the complete albeit obsolescent family of recorders. We might take issue with Sardelli's true claim, because recent research by Andrew Robinson, not cited in the bibliography, demonstrates the continuing existence of the recorder family throughout the eighteenth century ("Families of Recorders in the Late Seventeenth and...