Venetian Vivaldi's Inner Order

Finding Inner Order: Revisiting Vivaldi Concerto Op. 3 No. 8 

Summer is often a time of clearing out the old, going through attics, clearing cottage relics, selling off contents of family estates, or just clearing out one's mind to find something new again.

Mining teen dreams that were packed away can inspire new projects as a baby boomer now

One of the best summer strategies in cleansing out what's old and renewing your energies with new inspiration is to return to what you loved before you reached adulthood. There lay hidden, unmined and often unrealized passions and dreams. If you touch back on something you experienced as a teen that was not quite of this world, you can probably absorb it now and make it work positively in your life. Since Vivaldi invented ritornello form where the theme keeps returning to the main line, returning to his music now seemed very understandable.

How Rediscovering Music That Touched Us Before Can Be Rewarding

Vivaldi's Double Violin Concerto in A Minor is Light and Bright with Soaring Phrases

That is what happened with me and Vivaldi's Double Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 3, No. 8 in the recording by David and Igor Oistrach. This recording informed several of my early teen years, rehearsing a ballet competition quartet at age 14, riding bikes and soaking blistered toes from pointe shoes, and watching our ballet choreographer translate Vivaldi's sustained phrasing into 8 outstretched arms reaching across the room horizontally in a perfectly-balanced continuum. How, as young dancers, we wove and intertwined like leaves with golden ribbons and bent torsos - then back to the continuum on which all things in life rest - not quite of this world. If wellness is about maximizing natural health within the framework that we've each got, what could be of more value to it than a perfect teen influence that had been folded into the recesses of the subconscious?

What Is It In Vivaldi That Is So Uplifting?

Embracing the Platonic classicism of baroque music enriched our ballet quartet then as much as it does now. What is it about Vivaldi that is so uplifting?

Well, Vivaldi was a priest and worked in theatre, for starters. He worked extensively with tonalities in all of the music he wrote for different instruments. According to James Leonard, Vivaldi transformed music of his time. "Preceded only by a set of Trio Sonatas in 1705 and a set of Violin Sonatas in 1709, Antonio Vivaldi's first published set of concertos, called "L'estro armonico," was the most influential and innovative collection of orchestral music of the first half of the eighteenth century. "L'estro armonico" (roughly, The Genius of Harmony) was published as his Op. 3 in Amsterdam in 1711 by Estienne Roger and quickly completely changed the form from the more weighty Roman model of  to the lighter Venetian model of Vivaldi."

There is something easy about building and sustaining wellness when Vivaldi speaks to the calm of self-knowledge. This recording of Vivaldi offers the clarity of an order that helps us to feel calmness and peace. Its soaring with perfectly balanced violin lines blending in harmony is not easily forgotten.