Vivaldi le Quattro Stagioni

Harmonia Mundi's Rebel: Elements – Vivaldi: Four Seasons combines two of the Baroque's biggest instrumental barnburners as performed by one of the top period instrument groups in Europe, Akademie für Alte Musik, Berlin, under the leadership of concertmasters Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer and Georg Kallweit and featuring their star attraction, violinist Midori Seiler. Like Vivaldi's often derided as over-familiar Four Seasons, Jean-Féry Rebel's 1737 ballet Les Éléments does not want for good recordings, but it is nowhere near as famous as the Vivaldi; this is the first time the two have been combined on a recording, and these pieces are quite compatible given their shared, programmatic purposes.

The program begins with the most famous Vivaldi work of all, programmatic or not, the four violin concertos known as Le Quattro Stagioni or the Four Seasons. The rest of the music is much rarer.

I Musici perform Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni from "L'estro armonico", Op. 3. Recorded April 29 - May 6, 1959, Wien [1-12]; September 24 - October 2, 1962, Switzerland [13-15, 19-21]; and June 10-14, 1962, Netherlands [16-18]…

For this new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Jordi Savall conducts an all-female orchestra, as Vivaldi did in his time at the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, particularly in the field of folk music, playing violin, folk fiddle, kyl- kobiz, ghizzhak and similar instruments. She studied Baroque violin with Enrico Onofri (Palermo Conservatory) and Hiro Kurosaki (Mozarteum University), focusing on historically informed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires.

In their original incarnation on LP, the sound of Trevor Pinnock and his English Consort's 1981 recording of Vivaldi's famous Four Seasons was clear and bright. In subsequent CD iterations, it was clearer and brighter. But in this 2008 Japanese original bit processing issue, it has passed clearest and brightest and gone all the way to transparent and translucent. One can hear each of the 13 string players bows strike their strings and every pluck of Nigel North's theobro or Pinnock's harpsichord. And soloist Simon Standage sounds so vibrant and present that he may as well be in the room standing between the speakers.

For this new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Jordi Savall conducts an all-female orchestra, as Vivaldi did in his time at the Ospedale della Pieta in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, particularly in the field of folk music, playing violin, folk fiddle, kyl- kobiz, ghizzhak and similar instruments. She studied Baroque violin with Enrico Onofri (Palermo Conservatory) and Hiro Kurosaki (Mozarteum University), focusing on historically informed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires.

This recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos is ad hoc in more ways than one. The only name listed on the cover is that of violinist Alexandra Conunova, who, in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, assembled a one-off group of players in Switzerland. There is no shortage of recordings of these concertos, but this one has an unusual feature: Conunova begins not with the Violin Concerto in E major, Op. 8, No. 1 ("Spring"), but in medias res with the "Fall" concerto. No explanation for this is given, although it does result in the placement of the "Summer" finale, arguably the movement that Vivaldi's audiences would have found the most striking, as the final climax of the whole set. Conunova has been touted as a talent to watch, and those interested in her developing career may find this bold release of interest.

Violinist Giuliano Carmignola and the Venice Baroque Orchestra use a slightly different scoring of Vivaldi's masterpiece, the 1996 Ricordi critical edition, and somehow unveil world premieres of three Vivaldi concertos. Their period-instrument performance of The Four Seasons is beautifully played and recorded. Andrea Marcon's conducting stretches the Adagio movements out, but the group makes up for lost time in some feverish Allegro sections.

Antonio Vivaldi's four concertos known as «The Seasons» from his collection Opus 8 are probably the most frequently performed, recorded as well as maltreated works from the Baroque period. A number of other composers employed Vivaldi's four masterpieces in their own compositions already during the composer’s lifetime. «Le Printemps ou les saisons amusantes» are arrangements for popular instruments at the time such as the hurdy-gurdy or bagpipes.In 1766 Michel Corrette composed the psalm Laudate Dominum de coelis by adding additional voices to the music of Spring and in 1775 Jean-Jacques Rousseau even published Spring in a transcription for flute solo!

This venturesome, sometimes sharp-edged, but in any case, expressive new recording of the “Quattro stagioni” by La Folia Barockorchester offers perhaps a chance to see Vivaldi's masterpiece in a new, somewhat contemporary light…