>It would be more accurate to say that Vivaldi had five hundred ideas for a concerto, and that none of them ever was fully worked out. It is only after his wonderful opening bars, his extraordinary beginnings (which taught J. S. Bach so much), that his concertos bog down and begin to resemble each other in the deployment of harmonic cliches-cliches which would not matter (as they do not matter in Handel) if the large harmonic form were coherent and interesting, the cliches given a sense of direction and movement instead of a feeling of jogging on a treadmill.
>Vivaldi's operas are coming in for attention now: the same faults and virtues are manifest there. The arias begin strikingly, but continue with little of Handel's energy, Bach's intensity, or Alessandro Scarlatti's subtlety. These deficiencies are less crippling here: an aria is generally much shorter than a concerto movement. In comparing Vivaldi to Bach and Handel, some of his admirers (Marc Pincherle, for example) either refused to face his weaknesses, or else-what is worse-they never understood the strengths of the already established masters
>Overrated: Antonio Vivaldi. I'm tired of him. Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. I disagree. Instead, I think he began 500 concertos and never achieved anything in them. So he kept trying over and over again without ever quite succeeding.
