The Vivaldi Orchestra does play Vivaldi. In fact the string ensemble plays Vivaldi extremely well, and will be performing his Symphony No 1 in C tomorrow at 8pm at the City Hall Concert Hall.
But the reason for the name is not that the group specialises in the music of any one composer or period. The orchestra is so called because it is an all-female ensemble, based on a group the Venetian composer himself conducted, which was made up of young orphaned girls from the Pio Ospedale della Pieta, a Venetian orphanage.
The young women in the contemporary group are not required to be parentless but the founding director of the ensemble, the remarkable Svetlana Berzrodnaya, does demand a kind of familial loyalty from her musicians.
She is one of the premier string teachers in Russia today, and the performers are all graduates from the Moscow Conservatory and Gnesinyh Music College.
The repertoire this evening includes one of their most exciting pieces, by a Russian composer, naturally: Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.
A Spanish take on the bourgeoisie In his first film Spanish director Luis Bunuel teamed up with compatriot and fruitcake surrealist Salvador Dali to create one of the most revolting scenes ever made for cinema: a man slashes a woman's eye open with a razor.
