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Musica Sequenza
Vivaldi: The New Four Seasons

Album DE 2012 on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi label
Classical (Baroque)

Composers have always been fascinated by nature and the elements, by thunder and lightning for example. Particularly in the Baroque period, it was very much in vogue to depict all these natural phenomena in music. And one of the Baroque composers who possessed an exceptionally fine and effective range of timbres for the purpose was Antonio Vivaldi, who managed to portray not only all kinds of weather, from the heat of August to biting winter frost, in his famous cycle of violin concertos the Four Seasons: he even includes a swarm of insects, barking dogs and a tipsy reveller in the musical canvas. Vivaldi's best-known work forms part of a set of 12 concertos, the programmatic op.8 cycle, which bears the title "The Contest between Harmony and Invention" and was published in 1725. Nearly 300 years later, music-lovers can enjoy a new version of the Four Seasons. The Music is once again from Vivaldi's pen, but in this case we hear four concertos for bassoon, after the violin Vivaldi's second favourite as a solo instrument. For the New Four Seasons the Turkish bassoonist Burak Özdemir, who lives in Berlin, has written four poems, which unlike the sonnets that accompany the original Vivaldi concertos, describe not the seasons themselves, but the feelings of people today from one season to the next. After all, it's not only nature itself that has changed radically, thanks to human influence, since Vivaldi's time. As Burak Özdemir himself adds, the clear boundaries that used to apply between the seasons of the year have long since become fluid: "We eat strawberries in winter, and fly to sunny climes to escape the autumn rainstorms". This modern way of dealing with the seasons is also reflected in the New Four Seasons. Instead of following tradition (and Vivaldi) by starting with Spring, Özdemir begins with Winter. He has chosen four Vivaldi bassoon concertos to suit the seasons of the year, which also capture exactly the emotional worlds of his poems. They tell of winter melancholy and springtime longings, of fiery summer passion and autumnal pensiveness. The fact that all these different moods are conveyed not by a violin here, but by a solo bassoon, goes to show just what a close relationship Vivaldi had to the woodwind instrument. He composed no fewer than 37 concertos for the bassoon, and in each of them he writes for the bassoon as if it were a voice. At the same time, in the four concertos heard here the bassoon displays agility of virtuoso proportions when it soars up over a space of several octaves, or puts on a brilliant show with tricky arpeggios and jumps. The scores of the bassoon concertos did not appear in print during Vivaldi's lifetime, so that it's hardly possible to say when and for whom he wrote them. It's perfectly possible that he composed some pieces for the orchestra of the Venetian girls' orphanage Ospedale della Pietà where he taught the violin, especially as the French scholar Charles de Brosses wrote of the young musicians in the late 1730's: "They played the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello and the bassoon - in short, there is no instrument so large that they would fear it". We do at least have the name of the dedicatees of two of the concertos: one work was dedicated to Vivaldi's fellow Venetian musician Giuseppe Biacardi, while another bears the name of the composer's patron Wenzel von Morzin, the same Bohemian count to whom the Four Seasons themselves are also dedicated. Like his bassoon concertos, Vivaldi's 40 cantatas continue to be little-known. Yet the important 18th century English music scholar Charles Burney wrote that "Antonio Vivaldi is one of these composers who can justly hope for a place of honour in this genre". A wealth of melody and rhythmic and dramatic power make the two Vivaldi cantatas recorded here into masterpieces in their field. The secular cantatas for alto voice are traditionally set in ancient Arcadia, and tell of people unhappy in love. Emotions run high in the four-movement cantata Cessate, omai cessate, RV 684, ranging from grief and the longing for death to fury and frenzy as an expression of agony and torment. In the three-movement piece Care selve, amici prati, RV 671, on the other hand, the man disappointed in love takes refuge in this comforting bosom of mother nature. Our recital is rounded off by a visit among boisterous country folk with the variation movement La Follia, with which Vivaldi made his own arrangement of a tune that enjoyed great popularity in his day. This striking theme of a Portuguese folk dance has its origin in the 15th century; via Spain, it spread throughout Europe. Among the best-known sets of variations on La Follia are those by the French composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marin Marais. In Italy, Arcangelo Corelli arranged the bass theme in a solo sonata for violin and continuo in 1700, and it was probably this virtuose composition that inspired Vivaldi five years later to ice the cake of his official op. 1, a set of 12 sonatas for two violins and continuo entitled Suonate da camera a tre, with 19 brilliant variations on this popular theme.

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	Musica Sequenza b, album by
	Burak Özdemir bsn, TR bassoon

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