Antonio Vivaldi, Largo from Violin Concerto, RV 297, l'Inverno | Secrets of Organ Playing Contest, Week 86

This is my entry for the Secrets of Organ Playing Contest, Week 68. I play my transcription of the middle part of Vivaldi's Violin Concerto, RV 297. This concerto is one of the four violin concertos that became famous as "The Four Seasons". Hence it's name, l'Inverno, or in English: Winter.

Almost 6 months ago I made a transcription of the middle part of Vivaldi's third Flute Concerto (https://peakd.com/classical-music/@partitura/antonio-vivaldi-cantabile-from-flute-concerto-nr-3-rv-428). Today, I heard someone play a transcription of the second part of Vivaldi's Violin Concerto l'Inverno on organ. As I liked the effect of this piece on organ, I wanted to make it my entry for this week's concert. However, there is no transcription for organ of this composition available on the largest collection of free scores on the internet IMSLP. That's why I decided to repeat my trick from 6 months ago and create my own transcription for organ.

In this transcription the solo voice plays the literal notes the Violin plays in Vivaldi's original. The accompanying notes however, deviate from the original. Vivaldi has the bass voices play continuous eight notes. This does not work very well for organ in my opinion and I decided to replace them with a pattern of an quarter note with a rest with the duration of a quarter note. The harmonic layout I kept, of course, the same. Where Vivaldi has the bass voices play four eights notes e flat, the pedal in my transcription plays a quarter note e flat and a rest with the duration of a quarter note.

The middle voices of Vivaldi's original (the first and second violins of the orhestra) play continuos double voiced broken chords in sixtheenth notes. That is certainly playable on an organ as well, it's just not very idiomatic for organ music from the Baroque era. I therefore decided to condense the middle voices from the original into one voice and give this transcription the form of an organ trio. In this middle voice (played with the left hand) I treated the material of Vivaldi's original rather freely. I made sure the important harmonic notes are present in the right places, yet I also added some extra embelishments in 32th notes to break the monotony of only playing broken chords.

I hope you like the result. The score is available on my site: http://partitura.org/index.php/antonio-vivaldi-largo-from-violin-concerto-in-f-minor-rv-297-linverno

The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Voxus, of the Müller organ in the Sint Bavokerk, Haarlem (http://www.voxusorgans.com/en/product/haarlem).