Want to know where Vivaldi’s Op. 8 No. 7 comes from? 🤔

Here’s Adrian with a quick intro 😀

The 1st movement survives in Vivaldi’s own hand in Dresden, inscribed to Pisendel (Vivaldi’s star student & later concertmaster). The rest of the concerto survives only in the 1725 Amsterdam engraved edition.

If Vivaldi writes you a concerto, you must be pretty great 💅

Bearing an inscription to Johann Georg Pisendel, Vivaldi’s Op. 8 No. 7 (RV 242) opens the 2nd half of the Op. 8 set. Pisendel was Vivaldi’s star student & later concertmaster in Dresden, where the 1st movement survives in manuscript.

If Vivaldi’s greatest hits is the poster on your wall, 8+ is the album you’ve been missing 🫶

Out today, the second half of Vivaldi’s Op. 8 brings you music from the 1725 Amsterdam publication that isn’t The Four Seasons.

Hang on… something doesn’t look quite right here… 🤔
Adrian seems to be playing an awful lot of notes, but Vivaldi’s page shows long ones.

💡 It’s shorthand!

Can you hear the bells? 🔔

Vivaldi loved recycling his own ideas and dressing them up in new concertos, but this time he does something different.

In the finale of RV 332 (Op. 8 No. 8, G minor) he nods to Johann Paul von Westhoff’s Imitatione delle campane (“Imitation of bells”)…

Mid-chase, the violin solo takes off as if it’s the deer itself, fleeing the rest of the band… 😆

This snippet from Vivaldi’s “La caccia” (Op. 8 No. 10, RV 362: I. Allegro) overlays Vivaldi’s own manuscript from Turin, so you can see how many notes he squeezes into such a small space 🎻

Drop a 🎺 if you can hear the hunt, or a 🤔 if you think we’re reading too much into it!

Head to your favourite streaming platform to hear the first movement and see if you can spot the different ideas. You’ll have to wait for the full album on 14 November for the moment the deer meets its fate… 🦌

When the whole collection is about “the fusion of harmony and invention,” that choice feels deliberate.

If you know Autumn from The Four Seasons, you might recognise some of these hunting ideas cropping up again. Vivaldi was playing a long game with his musical motifs.

Ever wondered what a Baroque hunt sounds like? 🤔

Vivaldi’s La caccia (“The Hunt”) from Op. 8 is full of musical secrets: horn calls, “barking” dogs, fleeing deer, and even the moment the wounded beast falls.

What’s fascinating?

Among concertos 7–12, titles are rare — La caccia stands out.

We had a great time playing at St Martin-In-The-Fields last night! Thanks to all who joined us ❤️

And isn’t it lovely to see Ade with a violin again? He’s still recovering from his shoulder injury, but last night he was able to play in public for the first time since July 🥳🎉

Here's Ade with bit of background to Vivaldi's Solo Mandolin Concerto, speaking at our recent concert at @turnersims.bsky.social, Southampton.

We're really looking forward to reuniting with Raffaele La Ragione for more mandolin music very soon ⬇️

When you think of “the hunt”, what comes to mind?

Horns? Guns? Dogs? The drumming of horses’ hooves? A deer fleeing? 🦌

You should hear all of these in our new single, out today:
Vivaldi's “La caccia”, Op. 8, No. 10, RV 362: I. Allegro.

Look at that tidy print 😍

This comes from the 1st printed edition of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, published in Amsterdam, 1725 by Michel-Charles Le Cène as part of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione (“The Contest between Harmony & Invention”).

This is the third movement of the eleventh concerto and...

One concerto; two quite different versions.

Adrian is back to talk about Vivaldi’s love of recycling: not only reusing great melodies in different works, but sometimes replacing huge chunks of a piece with new ideas.