Vivaldi work gets a hearing

A choral work recently reattributed to Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi after centuries of being wrongly ascribed to one of his contemporaries received its first modern performance Tuesday in Australia.

The manuscript was found in the Saxon State Library in Dresden, Germany, by Janice Stockigt, a musicologist at Melbourne University who was in her final week of a five-year research project into sacred music in the German royal court. She noticed patterns that led her to believe it had been wrongly cataloged. She took the manuscript to a leading Vivaldi expert, professor Michael Talbot of the University of Liverpool, who agreed that it had been composed by Vivaldi.

A snippet of the 35-minute piece, an 11-movement Dixit Dominis for choir and soloists, was played by an ensemble at Melbourne University on Tuesday. A full performance is being planned for next year in Dresden as part of the city’s 800th anniversary celebration.