Winter SPARKS (Chicago) – Notes on the Program

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The Golden Age of Concerti

by Alan Choo & Jeannette Sorrell

The Baroque period was the golden era for the concerto genre, as composers pushed the technical and expressive boundaries of all kinds of instruments, thereby attaining new heights in virtuosity and dramatic possibilities. Today’s program aims to fire up your cold, wintry day with a selection of concertos featuring the baroque flute, oboe, violin and cello.

The composer Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco (1675-1742) was born in Verona, just about an hour’s drive outside of Venice. His father was a renowned guitarist who saw his son’s talent and provided him with violin and cello lessons. Growing up in the shadow of Vivaldi, Dall’Abaco’s musical style very much emulates the Red Priest’s work. However, Dall’Abaco eventually went north to the courts of Munich and Brussels, where he worked as a chamber musician. During his years in Brussels he absorbed the French style.

The Passepieds from his Concerto à piu strumenti (“concerto for multiple instruments”) is a classic example of a composer writing in the French musical style within an Italian genre. The Passepied is a brisk dance in triple meter, here appearing as a pair of dances in minor and major keys, with a reprise of the first passepied after.

While Antonio Vivaldi is generally known today for his violin concertos, it is notable that he, together with Tomaso Albinoni and Alessandro Marcello, wrote one of the first concertos for the oboe. Composed in the 1720s very shortly after the Albinoni and Marcello concertos, the Oboe Concerto in A minor, RV 461 is one of around 20 concertos Vivaldi wrote for the oboe. The outer movements of the concerto feature orchestra ritornelli that are driving, slightly dark and intensely rhythmic, interspersed with oboe solo passages that range from light virtuosity to impassioned outcries. The middle movement provides a stark contrast in mood, creating a more contemplative, pastoral atmosphere in C major. Here, the oboe takes on an operatic role, singing long, expressive phrases that soar above a gentle, pulsating accompaniment in the strings.

For six years (1717-1723), Johann Sebastian Bach led one of the two finest orchestras of Germany. As music director at the palace of Köthen, he presided over a small but excellent orchestra of musicians who had formerly worked at the palace of Berlin. The prince of Köthen had successfully recruited these musicians from Berlin. The Berlin-Köthen musicians inspired in Bach an outpouring of virtuoso compositions for small orchestra. These pieces have become amongst the most beloved orchestral works in the world – the Brandenburg Concertos, the orchestral suites, and the violin concertos.

The pieces that we call the Orchestral Suites were labeled by Bach as “Ouvertures.” All of them are French-inspired suites consisting of a virtuosic overture in French style, followed by a series of dance movements. The great Ouverture no. 2 is essentially a flute concerto, and was clearly intended for a quite small ensemble so that the gentle baroque flute (or traverso) could be heard.

The opening Overture follows the classic French style, featuring a grand opening and closing section of dotted rhythms, sandwiching a fast, fugal middle section. The flute often doubles the first violins but breaks away for virtuosic episodes. The Rondeau is a graceful dance characterized by a recurring theme interspersed with contrasting episodes, providing a sense of balanced, courtly symmetry. The Sarabande is a slow, stately dance in triple meter. Bach employs a canon here — the bass line follows the melody exactly but at a different interval, creating a dense, emotive texture.

The pair of Bourrées are lighthearted, earthy dances, featuring the flute in a playful display of virtuosity in the second Bourrée. The Polonaise pays homage to the Polish folk dance, followed by its Double – its variation whereby the continuo section maintains the Polonaise theme while the flute performs a dazzling, continuous stream of sixteenth notes above them. The penultimate Menuet is elegant and understated, serving as a momentary breath of air before the high-energy finale. The closing Badinerie gets its name from the French word badiner (to jest or trifle). This is the suite’s most famous movement—a lightning-fast display of flute virtuosity that has made its way to become a staple of popular culture.

The French Baroque composer Marin Marais was a central figure at the court of Louis XIV. His Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris (The Bells of St. Genevieve) is named after the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (the site where the Panthéon now stands). Marais captures the acoustic experience of standing near the abbey as its bells rang out across the city, creating a dense, overlapping web of sound. The entire composition is built upon a three-note basso ostinato (a repeating ground bass): D-F-E, evoking the carillon that never ceases. While the bass remains constant, Marais weaves an increasingly complex and virtuosic series of variations above it, and occasionally heightens the drama through subtle harmonic shifts.

Vivaldi’s Concerto in F major, RV 572, an example of a “concerto for multiple instruments,” is an arrangement of an earlier concerto for just violin and cello, RV 544, with the same subtitle of “Il Proteo o sia il mondo al rovescio” (Proteus, or the World Turned Upside-Down). The latter phrase is a popular Baroque trope often associated with Carnival, where social and natural orders are inverted. In its original form of RV 544, Vivaldi turns the world “upside down” by writing the violin part in the bass clef (as if it were a cello) and the cello part in the treble clef (as if it were a violin), letting them occupy tonal registers that subvert traditional expectations. The evocative drone of the viola throughout the first movement acts as the central axis in the middle of the score, becoming the horizontal axis of this mirror where the two soloists switch roles. The viola drone is also widely interpreted to represent the shape-shifting god Proteus, whose omnipresence is felt through his ability to take different forms.

Vivaldi later expanded RV 544 into a concerto that also included solos for flute, oboe and harpsichord. Recent research suggests that this expanded version (RV 572) may have been prepared for the orchestra of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome. Ottoboni’s ensemble was one of the few in Italy at the time that could boast the specific “extra” wind players and virtuoso harpsichordist required. Whilst the original “upside down” switching of the violin and cello ranges went away with this version, Vivaldi gained access to the tonal colors of more instruments as soloists pair up to engage in friendly conversation and dramatic sparring.

We close our program with the ever-popular Concerto for Two Violins, which, as with most of Bach’s concertos, had most likely been written for Köthen, but was revived by Bach for the Leipzig Collegium. In the first movement, the two soloists engage in a dramatic discourse, building on a ritornello that clearly shows the influence of Vivaldi. In the second movement, they converse serenely as two intimate friends, in sunny F major. In the third, they launch into a fiery and virtuosic duel, showing that Bach could fully challenge Vivaldi at his own game.

©2026 Alan Choo & Jeannette Sorrell
Singapore & Cleveland, OH