An interview with

Adrian Chandler

Why was Vivaldi drawn to the double concerto genre?

It’s a bit of an enigma really – he appears to be the only Italian that composed for that sort of combination of instruments. It first turns up in L’estro armonico. There was nothing really before it, though to somebody such as Vivaldi it was probably sort of a fairly obvious thing to do; if you’ve got the soloists then why not do it? Then if you’ve done it for two violins then why not two oboes, two horns, and then mixtures of instruments?

Concerto per S.A.S.I.S.P.G.M.D.G.S.M.B is quite a title...

It was probably written for somebody he was hopeful of gaining patronage from. There are four or five concertos with that instrumentation, and I think possibly they were all written as theatre concertos to be played as entr’acte concerti within the opera. This one is probably the earliest of the lot. You can see ideas in this piece that then crop up in other concertos, for violin and two horns, two oboes and bassoon. And he calls the horns ‘tromba da caccia’ which is probably something to do with him not being very familiar with the instrument.

The album was crowd funded. Is this the future of recording? I think classical musicians are having to be ever more creative in finding money to make projects happen. I think classical music is going through something of a watershed at the moment. Twenty years ago record companies had budgets to pay artists in order to make their albums; that’s very rare these days, particularly with ‘specialist’ classical music.