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Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder.

Article Excerpt
Vivaldi's Music for Flute and Recorder. By Federico Maria Sardelli. Translated by Michael Talbot. Burlington, VT: Ashgate in association with Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi/Fondazione "Giorgio Cini", 2007. [xxii, 336 p. ISBN-10 075463714X; ISBN-13 9780754637141. $99.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographies, references, indexes.

The book under review is an expanded English version of Sardelli's La musica per flauto di Antonio Vivaldi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), translated by one of the most eminent Vivaldi scholars of today, who also contributed some of the additional material. The original book constituted a considerable achievement in woodwind scholarship: the first book-length study of Vivaldi's imaginative music for flute and recorder (in Italian, both kinds of flauto) by someone well-versed in the composer's music in general as well as previous research on the subject and possessing an obvious love for the period. The main preoccupations of the book were matters of instrumentation, dating, and the players and occasions for which pieces were written. Perhaps the most stimulating section, on Vivaldi's use of the flute and recorder in vocal music, explored virtually uncharted territory.

The translation retains the book's division into two parts, of disparate length (54, 134 pp.). In part I, "The Recorder and Flute in Italy in Vivaldi's Time," Sardelli looks at the social, musical, and organological evidence for...

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