Sunday Baroque

Vivaldi ~ Concerto for Two Mandolins ~ in G ~ RV 532

From theIndependent.co.uk – Vivaldi ‘wrote mainly for women’.

For 37 years he worked as music master in a female orphanage. Here babies, often abandoned for their deformities, were posted through a hole in the wall and brought up by the nuns. Boys reached adolescence and were sent away, but talented girls were kept for musical training.

…Vivaldi was sensitive to the girls’ sad start in life and had instruments specially adapted for some of the deformed musicians.

Dr John Kitchen, of Edinburgh University, says this was not so unusual. “Women were doing far more in the musical world at this time than the history books would have us believe,” he says. There were other orphanage orchestras in the city with female choirs. Yet outside Venice the concept of a non-religious female choir was unknown.

Vivaldi ~ Concerto for Two Mandolins ~ in G ~ RV 532

Ensemble Telemann Consort, п. р V.Proshutinsky ~ Elena Zabavskaya & Ekaterina Mochalova, mandolins ~ Moscow

Photo credit: Photo credit: International museum and library of music [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons