Although he is best known for his endlessly imaginative instrumental music, Vivaldi also produced a significant body of alluring vocal works, ranging from operas to small-scale religious pieces. This program illustrates his prowess in several musical genres, both secular and sacred, that came to maturity in the Baroque era: opera, concerto, trio sonata, oratorio, and cantata. One of the most prolific and influential composers of his era, Vivaldi is a staple of modern concert programs. But the extraordinary popular appeal of his music is a fairly recent phenomenon. As early as 1720, Marcello pilloried Vivaldi’s operas in his satire Il teatro alla moda (The Fashionable Theater), and by the late 1700s most of his music had been consigned to obscurity. Not until the 1920s and ’30s, with the rediscovery of many of his manuscript scores, did interest in Vivaldi begin to pick up again. The introduction of long-playing recordings after World War II gave a further fillip to the “Vivaldi craze,” a development that one musicologist called “as momentous for lovers of Baroque music as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls for students of religion.”