The archive began with a dance: the Saltarello of 22 February 2008

The very first concert we ever recorded ended with a dance. Not in the audience – on the stage. It was the Saltarello, the finale of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, and its name comes from the Italian verb saltare – to jump. We could not have found a better name for our own leap into the unknown. And that is not the only coincidence: the project that got us started in the first place was run by a company of the same name.

An idea from Lahti

It all started in 2007 with the then General Director of the Slovak Philharmonic, the pianist Prof. Marian Lapšanský. In Lahti, Finland, he saw the ClassicLive project – internet broadcasts of concerts – and understood that this is how concerts would one day be shared with the world.

Behind ClassicLive was a Finnish company called Saltarello – yes, named after the same dance – with the technical platform supplied by TietoEnator. The first broadcast went out on 6 September 2007 from the Sibelius Festival in Lahti: the Lahti Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä played Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony. The Hungarian National Philharmonic and other orchestras soon joined in. But each of them had to produce its broadcasts itself – and that is exactly why the Slovak Philharmonic needed a team of its own.

Lapšanský brought together people who knew how to do it and took the project all the way to the Minister of Culture. What happened next is told in How we started, and the whole story as written by Stano Beňačka is in the History of the StreamTeam.

An Italian evening

On 22 February 2008 we pressed record in the Reduta for the first time. Alexander Rahbari was on the podium, and the programme was – perhaps by chance, perhaps not – entirely Italian:

• Giacomo Puccini – Preludio sinfonico, Op. 1, written while he was still a student at the Milan Conservatory,
• Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy – Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90 “Italian”,
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Capriccio italien, Op. 45, a memory of Rome,
• and to close, Romeo and Juliet – a story set in Verona.

We had two robotic cameras, a single Soundfield microphone hung in the attic of the Reduta after a small mountaineering expedition, and a 4:3 picture. There was not much we could do visually. But the recording is still in the archive today.

What is a saltarello

The saltarello is one of the oldest Italian dances that we also know from written music. The oldest notated saltarellos are in a Tuscan manuscript from the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, now in the British Library in London. In the 15th century the saltarello was danced after the slower, dignified basse danse – first you walked, then you jumped. As a folk couple dance in triple time it was still danced around Rome in the 19th century.

That is exactly how the Roman printmaker Bartolomeo Pinelli captured it in 1815: a girl holding out her apron, a young man who plays and dances at the same time, girls with a tambourine. And at the bottom left, a pair of shoes someone has kicked off – presumably to jump better.

Mendelssohn in Rome

Fifteen years later, in 1830–1831, the young Felix Mendelssohn travelled through Italy. In Rome he experienced the carnival and came home with his head full of tunes. He completed the symphony for the Philharmonic Society of London and conducted its first performance himself in London on 13 May 1833.

Its finale is a saltarello – fast, tireless, with a rhythm that will not let your feet rest, and with a tarantella mixed in. And it has one peculiarity: a symphony in bright A major ends in the minor. An Italian carnival is not only carefree fun.

Play it

You can play the Saltarello from our first recording right from its beginning. A few seconds are enough to understand why the dance is named after jumping.

We have gathered more of our oldest recordings in the playlist Our beginnings. Eighteen years have passed since then; two cameras have become Full HD recordings, and one evening has become hundreds of concerts. But it all started with a dance.