Vivaldi’s Op. 10, published in Amsterdam around 1729, was the first set of concertos for transverse flute ever printed. Before that the instrument was a curiosity in the orchestra; after that it had a repertoire. Six concertos, and the second one is La notte — the night.
It is a strange piece, structurally. Instead of the usual fast–slow–fast, it runs through a sequence of short movements with titles: a Largo opening, then Fantasmi — ghosts — then a second Largo, a Presto, then Il sonno, sleep, and finally an Allegro.
Vivaldi is not being coy about any of it. Fantasmi is the whole orchestra lunging in jagged unison at something that isn’t there, breaking off, lunging again. Il sonno is the extraordinary one: the strings sink to a murmur, the harmony stops moving altogether, and the flute is left breathing over the top of it. Four bars of held chords going nowhere — the sound of a room at three in the morning.
Vivaldi wrote roughly five hundred concertos and is regularly accused of writing the same one five hundred times. La notte is the answer to that charge.
Emmanuel Pahud with Andrea Marcon and the Berliner Philharmoniker: