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About this Piece

The oboe, liked the bassoon and Baroque flute, was a 17th-century Parisian invention that took a few decades to spread throughout Europe. It came to Venice in the 1700s as a German import. Vivaldi composed about 16 oboe concertos, and about half of them are either reworkings of earlier concertos for other instruments, or were themselves later reworked into concertos for other instruments. The concerto RV 450 is likely a reworking of his bassoon concerto, RV 471, which may explain the very active bass in the first movement’s ritornellos.

— Howard Posner