Everyone was a college student; some were graduate students, while I was in tenth grade. After nervously taking my cello out and tuning, I realized I was the only cello player. Shortly afterwards, Ecuador’s most famous conductor, Álvaro Manzano, came out. All I could think about was how in over my head I was. Without saying anything, he simply raised his arms, everything went from chaos to complete silence in less than a second. He took a breath, and two beats later we started playing.
The sound of a whole orchestra sight reading Vivaldi and having it sound perfect is something I couldn’t even dream of coming from the school’s orchestra. The clarity and explosiveness of the sound is something unimaginably fulfilling. The feeling you get being part of such a perfect sound is something that takes over your body. I had trouble playing along simply from the distraction from hearing the perfection of the music around me.
The strong and fast beginning in Vivaldi’s Gloria can instantly make the musician lose himself playing. The strength that comes from the string unison along with strong-beat accents from the wind section, followed by a question and answer passage is what makes this first movement so robust and alive, and what made me lose myself when the concert began.
The beginning was so frantic at unison that you just became part of the whole without the ability to think for myself. Halfway through the first movement in knew what was coming. I looked at the conductor just as he gave the down beat and I braced. Before going into the upbeat he pointed behind us, gave the upbeat and marked an entrance. A magnificent explosion of voices swept in: a 150 person choir in unity with the entire orchestra. That moment we all became a single unit; that moment everyone’s spirit was automatically lifted and everything seemed joyful.
This is a piece I didn’t need to be religious to love and get excited about. Vivaldi successfully transmits unity, hope and joy regardless of your views. Though having deeply catholic lyrics, everyone can relate to the message behind the music. Music, like religion, tries to bring people together, have us be part of something bigger, and make peace with what we cannot explain; all with the single purpose of making everyone’s life a little bit happier. This is everything you experience when playing Vivaldi’s Gloria, you get together with a group of strangers to become a single unit and produce a sound that elevates everyone and produces joy in the audience as well as ourselves.