Skip to main content

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments

Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons reigns as one of the world’s most recognizable early 18th-century pieces, thanks to its frequent appearances in films and television commercials.

Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Seasons stunned listeners by telling a story without the help of a human voice. Vivaldi drew on four existing sonnets (possibly of his own provenance), using strings to paint a narrative filled with spring thunderstorms, summer’s swelter, autumnal hunts and harvests, and the icy winds of winter.

The composer studded his score with precisely placed lines from the sonnets, to convey his expectations that the musicians would use their instruments to sonically embody the experiences being described.

For two hundred years, musicians cleaved closely to Vivaldi’s original orchestration.

The last hundred years, however, have seen a wide range of instruments and interpretations. Drums, synths, an electric guitar, a Chinese pipa, an Indian sarangi, a pair of Inuit throat singers, a Japanese a cappella women’s chorus, a Theremin and a musical saw are among those to have taken a stab at The Four Seasons’ drowsing goatherd, barking dog, and twittering birdies.

Remembering that Vivaldi himself was a great innovator, we suggest that there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from all that to revisit the original flavor.

The San Francisco-based early music ensemble, Voices of Music does so beautifully, above, with a video playlist of live performances given between 2015 and 2018, with the four concertos edited to be presented in their traditional order.

Voices of Music co-directors David Tayler and Hanneke van Proosdij were adamant that these high quality audio recordings would leave listeners feeling as if they are in the same room with the musicians and their baroque instruments. As Tayler told Early Music America:

We did tests where we sat in the audience listening to the mix. We stopped when we got to the point that it sounded like sitting in the audience. We didn’t want something that looked like a concert, with a CD playing in the background.

Multiple stationery cameras ensured that the mostly standing performers’ spontaneous physical responses to the music and each other would not pass unremarked. As tempting as it is to savor these joyful sounds with ears alone, we recommend taking it in with your eyes, too. The pleasure these virtuosos take in Vivaldi and each other is a delight.

You also won’t want to miss the English translations of the sonnet, broken into subtitles and timed to appear at the exact place where they appear in Vivaldi’s 300 year-old score.

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

While the audience reactions were edited from the presentation above, we’d be remiss if we didn’t direct you to a playlist wherein these virtuoso players are seen graciously accepting the applause of the crowds who were lucky enough to catch these performances in person.

Related Content:

Yes’ Rick Wakeman Explores Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Why It Was the First Concept Album

The Authentic Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: Watch a Performance Based on Original Manuscripts & Played with 18th-Century Instruments

Why We Love Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”: An Animated Music Lesson

Ayun Halliday is an author, theatermaker, and the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest book, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, will be published in early 2022.  Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3qEXe7w
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more