Mandolin Concerto in C, first movement

Vivaldi wrote this concerto around 1725 for mandolin, strings and harpsichord, and it is one of a very short list of concertos any composer of the period wrote for the instrument. He spent most of his working life teaching at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, an orphanage whose girls played an unusual range of instruments to a very high standard, and the mandolin works are generally taken to have been written for them. The autograph sits in Turin with the rest of the Vivaldi manuscripts that resurfaced in the 1920s.

The mandolin he had in mind was not this one. A Baroque mandolino had gut strings, six courses, its own tuning and a much lighter tone, and it was plucked with the fingers rather than a pick. A modern instrument reads the same notes at the same pitch, so nothing on this page had to be moved, but it answers with more attack and more edge than Vivaldi would have heard.

Three movements, Allegro, Largo in A minor and Allegro. The first movement's theme turned up in Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, and it has been in film and television soundtracks steadily since.

The ritornello is built on repeated notes and almost nothing else. Four bars hammer a single G, one low and three high, sixteen times to the bar. Then the pattern climbs: C under G, C under F, D under A, D under G, E under B, E under A, F under C. Seven rungs on the same rhythm, with the hand at the eighth fret of the E course by the top rung, and the scale that tumbles out of it is the first real melody in the movement.

The solo entry is the other half of the page. It is a zigzag of sixteenths, down a third and up a second over and over, first over the ritornello's own harmony and then sequenced a step higher each time. On a mandolin this is a picking study with a tune attached. Every note is the same length and there are no rests to breathe in, so the down-up alternation has to stay even as the speed climbs. The doubled note values need watching: what looks like a page of eighth notes is a page of sixteenths, and the beat runs at half the number on the chip.