Sinfonia in B minor, ‘Al Santo Sepolcro’, RV 169

Program notes

About the Work

This brief, intense work shows a side of Vivaldi far removed from the sparkling exuberance of The Four Seasons. The Sinfonia ‘al Santo Sepolcro’ (‘at the Holy Sepulchre’) is a piece of sacred chamber music for strings, written for the solemnity of Holy Week, most likely to be played during a service at the Pietà, the Venetian institution where Vivaldi worked. Its title evokes the tomb of Christ, and its mood is correspondingly grave, dark and devout: a world of suspensions, dissonance and shadow.

In just a few minutes Vivaldi conjures an atmosphere of profound mourning. The piece is in two short linked sections, and it dispenses entirely with his usual brilliant solo display in favour of a concentrated, almost severe expressiveness, closer in spirit to the sacred music of the German Baroque than to the Venetian concerto. It makes a striking, contemplative opening to the concert, a moment of Baroque solemnity before the Romantic lyricism of Barber and the high spirits of Beethoven.

What to Listen For

Listen, in the opening Adagio, for the grinding dissonances and ‘sighing’ suspensions (notes that clash and only slowly resolve), which create the work’s atmosphere of grief and solemnity. This is music of darkness and weight, the strings moving in slow, heavy harmonies, deliberately archaic and intense; it sounds almost nothing like the Vivaldi of the popular concertos.

The second section is a short fugal Allegro, faster and more contrapuntal, the instruments imitating one another, but it too keeps to the prevailing seriousness of B minor rather than breaking into brightness. The whole piece is over in a few minutes, but it leaves a powerful impression: a glimpse of Vivaldi the devout church musician, capable of music as grave and moving as anything in the Baroque. Let its hushed solemnity set the mood before the concert opens out.