Red Priest
During his lifetime, Antonio Vivaldi was known as ‘Il Pretto Rosso’, the Red Priest, thanks to his youthful ordination and his flaming red hair. The son of a violinist at San Marco in Venice, Vivaldi’s musical pedigree was impeccable, and an excellent start to his career was coupled with astounding energy and productivity.
His vast output of ‘Concerti Grossi’, using soloists in groups, has inspired the present composition, placing groups of cornets and trombones around the performance area.
The score quotes freely from some of Vivaldi’s most popular compositions, including ‘Winter’ from the Four Seasons, the Motet ‘Nisi Dominus’, the famous ‘Gloria’, and the fugue from the D minor Concerto Grosso found in ‘L’Estro Armonico’.
However, it is the musical spirit of Vivaldi, a close contemporary of both Handel and Cassanova, that inspires this music, which should be played with a mixture of accuracy and abandoned virtuosity. For the greater part of his adult life, Vivaldi had been responsible for teaching music to the girls at the Pieta in Venice, and after the composer's death, the orphanage's authorities asked the artist Tiepolo to include his portrait in their new ceiling fresco. Surrounded by the angels of heaven, Vivaldi's red-haired image looks down on subsequent generations of musicians and forms the basis of the cover of this score.