VIVALDI: CONCERTOS FOR DIVERSE INSTRUMENTS - AUSTRIAN TONKUNSTLER ORCHESTRA

VIVALDI LINER NOTES 788

It is curious how the names of composers are familiar to musicologists and musicians for hundreds of years solely on the basis of a few compositions, and it isn’t necessarily a case of the mediocre being justly forgotten. The outstanding example of unjust neglect, is, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach, the bulk of whose music was virtually unknown until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Mendelssohn and Schumann began to conduct and perform his works, and the Bach Society was formed to publish all his known compositions. Among other composers whose fame rests on perhaps a dozen compositions out of the hundreds they have written, one might name, for example, Liszt, Hummel and Cherubini – and Vivaldi.