Concerto Grosso in F Op.6 No.2

When Michael Tippett was commissioned to write a string-orchestra piece to celebrate Corelli’s 300th birthday at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953 he found inspiration in the Concerto Grosso in F Op.6 No.2. What was particularly interesting for him was the contrast between two short sections, a sombre Adagio and a bright Vivace, in the middle of the first movement. From these few bars Tippett developed the many-sided structure and abundantly proliferating textures of the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli which is to be heard next in this programme.

The Vivace material that captured Tippett’s imagination in the Concerto Grosso in F first occurs in the opening bars. It is little more than a flourish but is so brilliantly written that it explains why Corelli was so effective in establishing the concerto with a solo ensemble of two violins and a cello as a favourite orchestral form in Europe in the 18th century – not least in this country, where Handel so successfully emulated him. The Allegro that follows, the main part of the movement characteristically exploiting the contrast between solo and orchestral strings, is interrupted by the Adagio and the Vivace in the form and the C major harmonies in which Tippett quotes them at the start of the Fantasia Concertante. The Allegro is then resumed in C major and brought to a sedate end by a few bars of Largo andante in F major.   

The second movement is a fugal Allegro on a theme introduced by the three soloists, taken up by the orchestra and developed in a continuing dialogue between the two ensembles. The Grave–Andante largo, in which there is no distinction between solo and orchestral parts, is not so much a movement in itself as an introduction to the closing Allegro – a tuneful binary-form frolic for the soloists punctuated from time to time by the others.