Concerto for two trumpets in C major RV 537

Vivaldi could write brilliantly for just about anything, as he demonstrated in no fewer than five hundred concertos for an astonishingly wide variety of instruments. While he wrote more than two hundred such works for the violin, however, he was very much less prolific as far as the trumpet was concerned. The violin, which was by far the most popular instrument in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century, was capable of performing anything he could want of a concerto soloist, and he was quite happy with the oboe too. The trumpet, on the other hand, was comparatively undeveloped in Vivaldi’s day: it had no keys or valves and many of the notes in the chromatic scale were unavailable to it. So – although he is thought to have written a set of concertos for five trumpets, which are now lost – the only existing Vivaldi concerto featuring the instrument is the present work for two trumpets and strings.

Given less than twenty different trumpet notes to play with, Vivaldi makes resourceful use of them. While he clearly felt that a full-scale slow movement would be inappropriate in this case – the central Largo is basically no more than a few chords for the strings – he was eager to celebrate the radiant sound of the trumpets interacting in quick tempo, one echoing the other or the two of them joined in parallel lines. In the middle section of both the Allegro movements he leaves it to the strings to introduce the harmonic variety, which gives the soloists a chance to draw breath before returning to their virtuoso scales, runs and fanfares.