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Antonio Vivaldi.

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Antonio Vivaldi. Six Flute Concertos, Op. 10, in Full Score: With Related Concertos for Other Wind Instruments. Edited with an introduction by Eleanor Selfridge-Field. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, c2002. [Introd., p. vii-ix; facsim. reprod., 1 p.; score, p. 1-166; the Dover edition, p. 169-76. ISBN 0-486-42243-7. $15.95.]

The historical and musical importance of Antonio Vivaldi's six concertos for transverse flute, four-part strings, and continuo, which were published as opus 10 in Amsterdam by Michel-Charles Le Cene in 1729, is undeniable. Even if this fairly recent dating by Rudolf Rasch ("'La famosa mano di Monsieur Roger': Antonio Vivaldi and his Dutch Publishers," Informazioni e studi vivaldiani 17 [1996]: 89-137) puts back by one year the date of ca. 1728 hitherto accepted by most Vivaldi scholars, including Eleanor Selfridge-Field in the edition under discussion, Vivaldi remains the first composer to have devoted a complete published opus to this genre, which, by the middle of the century, had entered into a golden age, with mass production on the part of such northern composers as Johann Adolph Hasse, Johan Joachim Agrell, Johann Adolph Scheibe, and (notoriously) Johann Joachim Quantz. Indeed, Vivaldi himself continued to cultivate the genre diligently: eight further flute concertos are extant in complete state and two more survive with missing movements, while catalogs of the period testify to the existence of numerous lost works.

To make up a volume of the required bulk, Selfridge-Field has added six works that are with one exception related in some way to compositions in opus 10. Concertos 1, 3, and 6 are followed by earlier, manuscript versions of the same works (respectively, RV 570, RV 90, and RV 101). The last two are chamber concertos, or concertos for a group of assorted solo instruments without orchestra; the first is a chamber concerto (identified in its original form as RV 98) that the composer has turned into a concerto for flute, oboe, violin, bassoon, and strings by reinforcing the oboe and violin with orchestral violins and doubling the bass part with violas playing an octave higher. Ironically, by opting for the orchestral (RV 570) rather than the chamber (RV 98) version of the prototype for Concerto 1, Selfridge-Field has missed an opportunity to bring out the latter for the first time in a modern edition.

Two of the three remaining complementary works are more problematic. Concerto 2 is followed not by its "chamber" forebear, RV 104, but by a bassoon concerto,...

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