The piece
The last piece of Vivaldi's first collection, published in Venice in 1705, is a Folia: an old dance tune, slow and solemn, and nineteen variations that carry it further and further, by turns tender, playful or dazzling, always over the same sixteen-bar bass. Noctave offers its theme and seven variations, the ones that sound best on the piano, chosen to go from the simplest to the most brilliant, in an arrangement written after an Amsterdam edition from the 1710s: both violins in the right hand, the bass in the left hand.
Each variation changes character and tempo: take the time to learn them one by one. In the second, keep the dotted rhythms light; in the tenth, let the right hand's arpeggios bounce above the quarter notes. The last ones ask for even sixteenths in both hands: scales in the left hand in the seventeenth, notes in thirds in the right hand in the twentieth, up to the end, soft, as the edition asks.
