Is summer (vivaldi) hard to play on the violin?
There are actually three violin parts in Vivaldi’s Summer Concerto. The solo violin part you would only give to your star pupil. However, some passages that look intimidating on paper aren’t quite so bad when you consider how the violin is constructed: in the finale, measure 41 on, all those skips of a twelfth from A to D and back to A are made easy by the fact that you can just play D as an open string. Besides the solo part, there are parts for first violins and second violins, of which there may be as few as two each or as many as twenty each (most performances avoid either extreme). In the case of Vivaldi’s concerto, these parts aren’t so difficult because they involve a lot of repeated notes, simple scale passages and arpeggios. For really difficult violin music I would look to the violin concertos of the 19th and 20th centuries. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, for example, was declared “unplayable” by the violinist Tchaikovsky wrote it for. It helps that it’s tonal, for
