Vivaldi wrote further cello concertos for the Pietà during the period 1723-1729, when he kept it supplied by special agreement with two concertos per month, and again between 17, when he once again held the title of maestro dei concerti. Most likely, these were written for the female musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian institution for foundlings that Vivaldi served intermittently as violin teacher or director of instrumental music from 1703 almost up to his death in 1741. Although the composer’s main instrument was the violin, for which he must have written his first solo concertos, the earliest datable concertos surviving from his pen are, strangely enough, ones for cello acquired in manuscript by a visiting German musician, Franz Homeck, in the winter of 1708-1709. Passages for solo cello are almost as old as the concerto genre itself, but in the earliest concertos these brief solo flights are decorative rather than structurally significant, and the concerto properly “for” cello had to wait to emerge until Vivaldi wrote the first known examples at the start of the eighteenth century. Concerto RV 414 in sol maggiore – III.Allegro, adagio, allegro, adagio -:- / 0:29

Vivaldi cello concerto