Patrick Gleeson, Antonio Vivaldi

condition (record/cover): EX+ / EX+

Insert included. No obi.

The first commercially released album recorded entirely on the New England Digital Synclavier II, the high-end digital synthesizer that arrived in 1980 to compete with the Fairlight CMI at roughly four times the price. Patrick Gleeson had run Different Fur Recording in San Francisco since the early seventies, producing Herbie Hancock's Sextant and Crossings and supplying ARP and Moog parts for a generation of Bay Area jazz-fusion records. By 1980 he had become Synclavier's principal artist-evangelist.

The Vivaldi Four Seasons (1723), with its independent voices and articulated rhythmic figuration, is exactly the kind of contrapuntal material the early Synclavier handled well, as Bach had been for the Moog a decade earlier. Gleeson skips the first movement of Winter (he says so on the back sleeve, with no further explanation). Produced by Chris Kuchler and Tom Null. The Japanese Victor pressing (VIC-28052, with obi and lyric insert) is the desirable original; a US 12" appeared on Varèse Sarabande (VCDM 1000.100) the same year.