Does an orphan always imagine her mother will one day return to claim her? Vivaldi’s Legacy, the latest offering from the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, explores Vivaldi’s work through a partial dramatisation scripted by playwright Alana Valentine. Actor Lilian Alejandra Valverde joins the ensemble on stage at times in the character of Anna Maria della Pietà — the orphaned girl trained as a musician in the Ospedale della Pietà in eighteenth-century Venice — giving voice to her imagined inner life. Paul Dyer (artistic director) and his Baroque Ensemble are joined by guest director and violin soloist Augusta McKay Lodge, a player and concertmaster in her own right with historically informed ensembles in Europe.
Together they offer a unique way to explore the unusual conditions in Venice that allowed these girls to train under Vivaldi himself. Anna Maria became a celebrated soloist and interpreter of his work.
The figure of Anna Maria who imagines she is playing to her mother sitting among the faithful and the wealthy tourists, cleverly points back to the social and economic relationships that shaped the music itself. The best music was heard at the four state-run Ospedali. The Pietà’s resident ensemble of girls was not a free-standing artistic collective like the players on stage tonight. Instead they were institutional capital, utilised by the State and by Vivaldi, composer and primary producer, to market his music and that of his contemporaries.
The program notes reveal that Vivaldi had a close relationship with the Pietà. For years he provided repertoire, pedagogical material and technical opportunities for the girls. Even after his formal employment ended he continued sending two concertos a month — a steady supply that kept the institutional machine working and gave players such as Anna Maria material on which to develop and display their gifts. Anna Maria’s partbook survives as an artefact containing solo parts for some thirty-one concertos, mostly by Vivaldi. It is striking how rarely we allow money and institutional demand to sit at the centre of how we talk about this repertoire.
Valentine’s text gives Anna Maria an imagined interior life. We see her beginning in the moment she was placed in the baby drawer, and a continuing, half-fantasised relationship with the mother she never knew that feeds her desire to become a musician. The dramatisation also draws attention to the screens. The girls performed behind grilles, partly as a continuation of earlier plague precautions and the Church’s architecture of controlled contact between the genders. Women and men playing together as equals on stage is a thoroughly modern phenomenon.
These allusions to historical invisibility made the visible life of the Brandenburg’s performance especially compelling. Augusta McKay Lodge is a very watchable leader. Directing from the violin, every cue, shared breath and small adjustment of tempo is written on her body. You could see her enjoying the music and enjoying the act of leading the attacks. Vivaldi’s music is string-centred; its language lives in the bow arm — the rushing scales, the repeated-note motor rhythms, the sudden thinning of texture so the solo line can flash forward.
The program sampled composers who worked in the Venetian orbit — Pisendel, Vivaldi, Visconti and Tartini — weaving in excerpts and complete readings of a number of Vivaldi’s works. Vivaldi perfected the fast–slow–fast pattern of the solo concerto. The structural engine of the fast movements is the switching between full ensemble and solo group. The powerful strings — nine violins led by Concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen, violas led by Principal Monique O’Dea, and lower strings led by Principal Jamie Hey — play the recurring refrain, then drop back so the soloist can take over. Within that tutti–solo alternation, Paul Dyer’s harpsichord proved a sensitive and constantly adjusting accompaniment, while the theorbos (Nicholas Pollock and Georgia Wilkie) rounded out the concertino, swapping to baroque guitars to add colour and rhythmic weight to the fuller texture.
Speed itself started to feel like a performative gesture rather than just a technical feature. In the second half, the E-major concerto “per Anna Maria” (one of the works preserved in her surviving partbook) begins with a relentless Allegro built on repeated arpeggios, and its later Andante grows progressively more difficult. Watching Augusta relish the test of her ability was one of the evening’s pleasures. Melissa Farrow’s playing of the baroque flute in Il Gardellino was quietly impressive — the flute steps forward with real character in the goldfinch calls — before the music returns to the collective drive, pulse and repeated figures of the strings. The evening ended with the Grave movement from the Concerto for Violin in D major, a spiritual high point, Anna in the spotlight looking down on the ensemble, then to black. A dramatic ending, and cue the applause.
City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney 15 August 2026
Program
Pisendel Sonata for violin in A minor, JunP IV.2 i [no tempo marking]
Vivaldi Concerto for strings & continuo in G minor, RV 156 i Allegro ii Adagio iii Allegro
Visconti (attrib. F. Gasparini) Prelude in D major from Select Preludes & Vollentarys for the Violin (1705)
Vivaldi Concerto for violin in D major, RV 229 i Allegro ii Largo iii Allegro
Vivaldi Concerto for violin & organ in C major, RV 774 (reconstructed O. Fourés) i Allegro ii Adagio iii Allegro
Vivaldi Concerto for strings & continuo in E minor, RV 133 i Allegro ii Largo iii Allegro
Vivaldi Concerto for violin per Anna Maria in E major, RV 267a i Allegro—Adagio—Largo—Allegro—Adagio ii Andante iii Allegro
Vivaldi Concerto for violin in B-flat major ‘in due cori con violino discordato’, RV 583 ii Andante
Vivaldi Il Gardellino, Concerto for flute in D major, Op. 10 No. 3, RV 428 i Allegro ii Cantabile iii Allegro
Tartini Concerto for violin in G minor, Op. 1 No. 1, GT I.g01 i Allegro iii Cantabile iv Allegro assai
Vivaldi Concerto for violin in D major, RV 212 ii Grave
