The "red-headed priest", as he was nicknamed, is not only the author of the Four
Seasons and hundreds of other concertos, both programmatic and non-programmatic,
but also of numerous operas and vocal works that have been discovered and
recorded, shedding new light on the Venetian monument to Baroque music. Antonio
Lucio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678, in the midst of an earthquake in the
City of the Doges, in difficult circumstances that may explain his frail
constitution and lifelong asthma. The son of Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a barber
and violinist at Saint Mark's Basilica...