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Vivaldi produced three known settings of Psalm 112 (113 in Protestant bibles), of which this is the last, dating from around 1730. It appears to have been composed for a member of a group of seven Italian singers at the Saxon-Polish court in Dresden who had trained in Venice and Bologna between 1724 and 1730. As well as the composer’s autograph score, today preserved in Turin, a fair copy in the hand of his father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, survives in Dresden.

RV601, in G major, is a true virtuoso piece for a soprano (originally a castrato) able to reach D in alto. The galant inflections of its melodic lines remind one of the Neapolitan opera that had conquered Venice only a few years earlier. It contains some vivid word-painting, examples of which are the sustained trilled note on the first syllable of ‘saeculum’ (eternity) in movement 2; the long ascent representing sunrise in movement 3; the registral contrast of ‘caelo’ (heaven) and ‘terra’ (earth) in movement 4; the fierce urgency with which the poor are raised up from the dust in movement 5; the mechanically repetitive crotchets illustrating the word ‘collocet’ (set) in movement 6. The most memorable movement is unquestionably the seventh, ‘Gloria Patri’, in which the composer calls for an obbligato flute, which for Venice was still a relatively new instrument. Vivaldi certainly encountered the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz, a member of the Dresden orchestra, on the latter’s visit to Venice in 1726, and this movement can be seen as a retrospective homage to, and renewal of musical contact with, the eminent German.

from notes by Michael Talbot © 2001