Bob Draper:

>It does raise the question: How do the list members who love Bach yet
>criticise Vivaldi justify their stance?

I love both Vivaldi and Bach.  However, I do view them as very different
composers - composers with distinct personalities - and therefore have
no trouble imagining someone liking one and hating the other.  At their
most characteristic, I find the distinction to come close to Coleridge's
discussion of wit, fancy, and imagination.  Vivaldi to me is a composer
of wit and fancy, Bach a composer of imaginaton.  Both are splendidly
inventive, but Vivaldi's invention is one of the surface.  He wrote highly
finished works, full of wonderful surprises, but the surprise is the
surprise of a moment.  Bach's surprises have you thinking about them for a
long time afterward, and they often connect (especially in the cantatas) to
a Christian vision.  I'm not a Christian, but the stories of Christianity
have great power to just about anyone who grew up in Western culture.
Vivaldi seems to me a great composer, in certain matters of technique (like
orchestration), greater than Bach.  But Bach seems a great figure in the
wider culture.

Steve Schwartz