Vivaldi's Four Seasons, performed on original instruments by the award winning Early Music Ensemble Voices of Music.
Cynthia Miller Freivogel, Carla Moore & Alana Youssefian, soloists.
Voices of Music
Hanneke van Proosdij & David Tayler , directors
These concertos were individually performed live in our concerts from 2015-2018, using a similar recording setup. Audience noise and applause have been removed in this version in preparation for an album release of the full version.
The subtitles in this video were written 300 years ago in the form of a sonnet, presumably by Vivaldi, and engraved directly onto the music. You may view the original Italian or an English translation by using the CC button.
Of all of Vivaldi’s concertos, the Four Seasons are the most widely performed of his works today. Vivaldi managed to change the course of music history by writing these four concertos; composers had set the seasons, the hours, the months and many other programs of music in the 17th century, but no one had written a set like the Four Seasons. Vivaldi did not just create a new kind of musical program, he refined the way in which all of the elements of the program work with the music, and he spun his programmatic flourishes over a very detailed harmonic and contrapuntal plan. Composers had previously written music that shivered with the cold, created storms and winds, imitated birds, and so on, but not to the extent and not with the careful planning of these concertos.
Vivaldi provided a detailed commentary for his work in the form of individual sonnets keyed exactly to different movements in the music, along with tempo indications, ornaments and articulation marks (please see the text and translations opposite the program). It’s an interesting question as to how to interpret Vivaldi’s design, and part of the charm of the works is that the program is very clear, yet the possibilities are endless: the main challenge is to choose between a mimetic and allegorical interpretation. In a mimetic interpretation, the performers would use extended techniques on their instruments to imitate as directly as possible the sounds of the program, including chattering teeth, raindrops, wind and stamping feet. In an allegorical performance, the players would play in such a way as to allow the listeners to use their imaginations to freely recreate the program: each musical line could convey a different layer of meaning. Similarly, by using different textures and phrasing in each of the musical lines as well the different sections, the performers can build up a tapestry of textures. It’s clear from contemporaneous accounts that a purely mimetic performance was frowned upon as too obvious, yet it is also clear that in Italy and Germany, string players were inventing new techniques to include a wider variety of sounds in their playing. Thus, it is quite possible to read the words “raindrops” and create a new, imaginative musical version of a rainy, wind-swept landscape without presenting the music pre-interpreted for the viewer.
Spring: Allegro - 0:00
Largo - 3:32
Allegro - 6:13
Summer: Allegro non molto - 10:09
Adagio - 15:31
Presto - 17:46
Autumn: Allegro - 20:42
Adagio molto - 26:14
Allegro - 28:25
Winter: Allegro non molto - 31:56
Largo - 35:29
Allegro - 37:25
Credits 40:44
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