Violin Concerto in G Minor

Man languishes under the heat of the sun in “Summer”, the second of the four individual violin concertos that make up Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The blanched landscape created by the high-lying violins is stirred in the second section by bird calls; the accompanying sonnet mentions a turtledove and finch, but all we hear is a cuckoo calling lazily out from among the violins. A shivering gust of wind from the soloist quickly gathers momentum in eddying upper strings. For a moment, it seems to have passed by, only to return at full force to drive the movement to its exhilarating ending. In the central “Adagio”, a shepherd fears the storm to come, his anxiety spun into the soloist’s anxious melody, layering dissonance upon dissonance. The strings around it flutter and chatter in a sour insect-hum—the gnats and flies of the accompanying sonnet. But they are swept brutally away by the final “Presto”, as the long-awaited storm finally descends. “The heavens roar and great hailstones beat down,” the poem tells us. Even without this narrative guide, we’d be left with no doubt by the surging semiquavers that tear up and down through the strings and the lightning that cascades with dazzling brilliance through the solo violin. The violent virtuosity here is thrilling, the orchestra summoning listeners into a powerful, whirling dance from which there is no escape. About Vivaldi's The Four Seasons From a sudden spring thunderstorm to lazy summer heat, harvest songs and dances (and the drinking that fuels them) to the tooth-chattering chill of the winter wind—Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is a vivid portrait of a year in country life, painted in sound. Published in 1725, this group of four violin concertos are the opening works of a larger collection, The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, but they’ve always stood apart: descriptive music in an age of abstraction, film music long before film itself. Dismissed in their day as gimmicks or wild innovation, it took more than 200 years for these sonic snapshots to find a regular place in the repertoire.