VIVALDI – PIAZZOLLA PROGRAM EIGHT SEASONS

Baroque visits tango, one season becomes another or, as Gidon Kremer himself puts it, ‘the globe being round, implies two hemispheres’. The idea was not entirely new and was practised already at a London ‘Prom’. Now it’s on disc, coolly attenuated Vivaldi with his famous opus magnum meets hot-headed Piazzolla, both of them bristling with life. Search a little beneauth the surface, and there are certain parallels. Both composers alternate fast and slow episodes; both call on similar instrumentation, and in two cases Piazzolla (as arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov) actually quotes Vivaldi, bringing the Red Priest’s Winterto his own Summer, then warming a Piazzollan Winter witch a touch of Vivaldi’s Summer.

This is no crossover, but a creative juxtaposition of disparate styles. New neighbours mean a new lease of life for both, and the switch never jars – mainly because Kremer’s dancing, sound-conscious and consistently spontaneous plying style is a common attribute. Seldom his violin has sounded better on disc – creamy and keen-edged, with every subtle nuance cleanly reproduced.

After Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’, Piazzolla kicks in with ‘Summer in Buenos Aires’, a darkly dancing tango that soon softens to a characteristic brand of melancholy. Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ enters on live wire, sul ponticello, with keen accents and much chirruping among the fiddles. Piazzolla’s  ‘Autumn in Buenos Aires’ alternates writing for solo violin and cello whereas Vivaldi’s ‘Autumn’ is bright, fast, freely improvisational and with marked crescendo over the start of this movement. ‘Winter in Buenos Aires’ sets off to a sombre cello solo then, after a violin cadenza, starts to speed up. Vivaldi’s largo (‘Winter’) hast one of the fastest plucked showers one ever heard – just 1’13” and with highly mobile bowed bass line. The sequence ends, as it began, with Spring, ….this time in Buenos Aires, a devil-may-dare mix of yearning, sadness and heady exultation.

One should love it all, but if one just fancy hearing Kremer’s plucky, versicoloured Four Seasons on its own, one can always programme the CD player to dispense with the rest. Personally, I’d play the programme as planned!

For her recording in 2008 Lara St. John used the same Desyatnikov arrangement of Piazzolla’s Las cuatro estaciones porteñas in her luxury edited performances. Only she is accompanied by the strings of the Simón Bolívar Youth orchestra, musicians that have the Argentinian esprit more in their blood than Kremers Baltic musicians. Whereas with Kremer the music perhaps sounds more exact, with the South Amercans i gets a more tango-like flavour. Another difference is that St. John separates the works and plays them perhaps more logically after each other.

Try both to decide which you like better is my advice!

Vivaldi: Le quattro stagioni op. 8/1-4; Piazzolla: Las  cuatro estanciones porteñas. Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica. Nonesuch 7559-79568-2 (1999).

Vivaldi: Le quattro stagioni op. 8/1-4; Piazzolla: Las  cuatro estanciones porteñas. Lara St. John, Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, Eduardo Marturet. Analecton ANC 134 (2008).