” Vivaldi didn’t write 500 concertoes - he wrote one concerto 500 times. - Strainvsky “
My esteem for Stravinsky just went up a notch ;-)
A few years back, one of the sole Classical music radio stations in Boston, WCRB, ran a Listeners Poll to determine the FAVORITE (or BEST, my memory is hazy) CLASSICAL COMPOSER of all time. The listeners chose Vivaldi overwhelmingly, subjecting the rest of us to 24 hours of ascending and descending rolling strings.
Why Vivaldi? I surmised later that, due to the acute concentration of colleges in Boston, the listeners, good little indoctrinaires that they were, were merely parroting the opinions of the various college “professors” who taught the required Music Appreciation class. Vivaldi, from what I can recall from this “Required Elective”, figures predominantly. One can go mentally baroque listening to those whiny strings...