Though its music is unknown except to a very few Baroque specialists and an even fewer violinists, Pietro Antonio Locatelli's L'arte del violino, Op. 3 (The Art of the Violin) (1733)—12 concertos for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo—is truly one of the most extraordinary works for violin ever conceived and penned, and as it turned out, a work that informed and continues to indirectly inform composers the world round. Locatelli was a master violinist, as were most of the Italian concerto composers, and the volume of concerti grossi released in 1721, as Op. 1, had elevated him from well-known virtuoso to famous virtuoso/composer. With L'arte del violino, Op. 3, he moved the role and technique of violin playing, and the solo concerto as a genre, into a whole new realm. Locatelli dedicated L'arte del violino to the Venetian patriarch Girolamo Michiel Lini, for whom he had performed while staying in the city and of whose orchestra Locatelli remarked upon the skill and "unparalleled size."

Ignoring, for the moment, the wonderful style and impeccable form of the Op. 3 concertos, the first thing one notices, when a performance of a concerto from L'arte del violino begins, is how extraordinarily difficult the solo violin part is, but this can hardly prepare one for the shock to come: at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos, just before the final tutti, Locatelli inserts a capriccio, or caprice, for unaccompanied solo violin. There are 24 in all, of fiendish and unprecedented technical difficulty. If the idea of 24 Caprices for solo violin rings a bell for violin lovers, it might be mentioned that it was after discovering a copy of Locatelli's L'arte del violino in Genoa that Paganini began to work on his own 24 Caprices for solo violin. Paganini even quotes one of Locatelli's (from the first movement of the Concerto in E major, Op. 3, No. 4) in his very first caprice. Locatelli's caprices, when performed at all, are usually extracted from the concertos and played as self-standing virtuoso truffles. When heard in this fashion one cannot enjoy the remarkable way that they sprout from the dramatic conclusions to the quick movements of the concertos. The manner of the solo concerto cadenza, especially, but not exclusively, the violin cadenza, was codified by Locatelli in ways only touched upon by earlier composers, like Vivaldi and Corelli. The effects on both concerto format and violin technique were far-reaching indeed.

The 12 concertos in Op. 3 are all constructed after the by-then venerable model of Torelli's solo concerto in three movements, but Locatelli's creative interplay between the soloist and the tutti ensemble goes beyond anything that earlier concerto composers had devised. His constant surprises and clever ensemble effects, though perhaps not striking to a modern audience, were a delight to audiences of his day.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide