Xavier de Maistre has returned to kick off the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s first tour for 2020, which began in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last night, the French harpist – last in town for the Brandenburgs’ 2018 season – bringing flair and subtlety to Vivaldi’s Venice.

Xavier de Maistre and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. Photo © Keith Saunders

Venice was Vivaldi’s birthplace, the city in which he was ordained as a priest, and where he enjoyed considerable success as an opera composer. It was also the city of his decades-long association with the orphanage Ospedale della Pietà and it’s formidable (if the music he wrote for it is anything to go by) all-female music ensemble, which resulted in a massive output of concertos – he wrote over 500 all up, most of them for the Pietà. This program – based on one De Maistre recorded in 2012 with German period instrument band l’arte del mondo and Werner Ehrhardt – celebrates both the music of Vivaldi as well as his Venetian contemporaries, such as Alessandro Marcello, Tomaso Albinoni and Giovanni Battista Pescetti – whose legacies have since been obscured...