Vivaldi's Great Venetian Mass

Les Arts Florissants and the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud - the two Cultural Encounter Centers of the Pays de la Loire region - join forces for a new edition of “Christmas Arts Flo at Fontevraud”, where the joy of music unites with the beauty of heritage!

It is not always easy to reconstruct the context of a work from the past. In the case of Vivaldi’s famous Gloria, the actual religious service for which the piece was composed is an equation with multiple unknowns, only a few parts of which are known to us today. So we attempted to reconstruct this ordinary mass by taking Vivaldi’s own sacred music as a model and studying the liturgical practices of Venice at that time. This approach allows us to perform the entire mass and, for the first time, to hear Vivladi’s music in the context for which it was created.”

Paul Agnew