Appropos of Just About Nothing: Vivaldi Bassoon Concerti

So I'm listening to a baroque mix on Rhapsody (it was supposed to be undistracting background music -- the joke's on me, apparently) and I hear this very neat thing (it's identifed only as "Allegro" and from, like, Vivaldi's Greatest Hits or something) that, after a second of triangulating (it's a double reed, not an oboe, probably not an english horn, probably not a contrabassoon) I figure it's a bassoon. And it's featured through the 5 or 6 minute movement, so I figure it's a concerto (which form Vivaldi, a little animated info box helpfully informs me, helped promote the popularity of).

Now, I've always liked Vivaldi, but I'm not one of those folks who studies up much on the composers. I'll scan the program notes at the symphony but, you know, I'm pretty much about the music. Once you've read about one great composer dying penniless and alone in squalor, you've pretty much read 'em all.

So I google 'vivaldi bassoon ...' And before I get much farther, Google's 'assistant' or whatever suggests "concertos" -- I'm thinking plural?

How many people write multiple bassoon concerti? Must have started out as a bassoonist.

I go a little farther, I finally find a listing for bassoon concertos, volume 1 and I'm thinking, well, probably more than two, even, then.

I go a little farther...

... and I see the phrase "Vivaldi's thirty-seven bassoon concerti..." I don't think I saw whatever it said after that...

Thirty-seven bassoon concerti.

Now my interest is whetted.

Wikipedia is my friend. It confirms the seemingly ludicrous 37 figure.

And I get to the bio... he was a priest ("il Prete Rosso" -- The Red Priest -- they called him, which has a rather sinister ring to me... but then I think anything to do with The Church is kinda sinister. Okay... musta been one of the celibate ones if he found time to write 37 bassoon concerti...  Wait... the Red Priest is celibate? I dunno. Seems unlikely, somehow. But that's neither here nor there.)

Oh, wait... he was a violinist?!?

Well, if he wrote all those bassoon concerti, how the hell many violin concerti did he write?

Two.

What. The. Hell.


[Continue on to the comments immediately below for a little intrusion of factual reality into my WTH moment... turns out my whole post above turns on a whopper of a factual error. Hint: Vivaldi's arguably most famous work, The Four Seasons, which is comprised of four violin concerti, blows that violin concerto count out of the water right off the top -- and it doesn't stop there, by any stretch... Oh well. PS... The erroneous info in Wikipedia has since been corrected. And that is the beauty of Wikipedia. If that erratum had been in a print encyclopedia, it would have been there 'til the pages turned to dust. But one does have to keep one's eyes open... that two violin concerti thing should certainly have caused me to poke a little farther.]