Popularity
The Glorias remained in a relatively unknown status, until RV 589's revival by Alfredo Casella during "Vivaldi Week" in Siena (1939), along with the composer's setting of the Stabat Mater (RV 621). RV 589 enjoys well-founded popularity, performed at many sacred events, including Christmas. It has been recorded on almost one hundred CDs, sometimes paired with Bach's Magnificat (BWV 243), Vivaldi's own Magnificat settings (RV 610-611), or Vivaldi's Beatus Vir (RV 597). RV 588, however, has had little success and has only been published in few albums. Attempts to create more attention to RV 588 and other sacred Vivaldi works (most notably by The King's Consort) have gone underway.
As with many other pieces of the Baroque era, RV 589 (and its lesser known companion RV 588) have been performed in historically-performed instrumentation, even with the use of an all-female choir to simulate choral conditions at the Pietà . There are several different editions, and choirs need to exercise caution when combining different vocal and orchestral editions.
RV 589 has also been used in a number of films. The first movement featured in the 1996 Scott Hicks film Shine about pianist David Helfgott. An adaptation of the second movement was used with profound effect in the final climactic scenes of the 1985 Andrei Konchalovsky film Runaway Train.
Read more about this topic: Gloria (Vivaldi)
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)