Concerto Grosso, op. 3, No. 11 in D Minor, RV 565
Antonio Vivaldi was the most important composer of the Italian Baroque period, although appreciation of that fact was slow in coming in later times. But, during his lifetime he was celebrated all over Europe, and his compositions were highly influential—mostly notably on J. S. Bach. He wrote almost fifty operas, but is remembered now for his amazing fecundity in composing instrumental works. He wrote about five hundred concertos (not as one unappreciative wag once said, “the same concerto five hundred times.”) While many of them feature wind instruments, the majority of them are for strings, and are practically an early eighteenth-century compendium of almost every imaginative passage or technique that one could ask of them. >>>