Coming up in Philly music: The girl from Vivaldi’s orphanage

Every performance of a Vivaldi concerto comes with program notes that tell us Vivaldi wrote most of his concertos for the orchestra of a girl’s orphanage. The girls were taught music and other accomplishments in the hope it would help them attract a good husband. For their first concert for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Italy’s leading period instrument group, Europa Galante, will present a multimedia program that focuses on the institution’s most famous virtuoso, a violinist named Chiara. (The girls had no last names, being orphans.) They’ll play seven pieces that Vivaldi and his contemporaries wrote for Chiara and accompany the music with a short film on Chiara’s life created by Lucrezia Le Moli, a young filmmaker who has directed seven feature films.

“Chiara's Diary — A Life at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice” is coming up on Friday, January 22 at 8pm at the Kimmel’s Perelman Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia. Tickets ($24) are available online or by calling 215-569-8080.