Vivaldi: The Four Seasons

As a composer, Antonio Vivaldi was one of the 18th century’s most brilliant. As a poet, however… Now that’s a slightly different story. In the margins of the manuscripts to each of his Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s celebrated quartet of violin concertos depicting an Italian year, are scribbled accompanying verse. Supposedly written by the composer himself, each poem is intended to provide reference points for the listener. But there’s a reason you won’t hear them recited in performance—they’re simply nowhere near as good as the music itself. Violinist Daniel Pioro has been plotting his new recording of The Four Seasons for a couple of decades, he reveals to Apple Music Classical. One of his first jobs was solving the problem of Vivaldi’s doggerel, and so he invited the brilliant Michael Morpurgo, former UK Children’s Laureate and author of War Horse among many other celebrated books, to mint a new set of poems that take Vivaldi’s imagery to delightful and perceptive new heights. “I sometimes feel that getting Michael to ‘Morpurgofy’ these sonnets, as it were, is a way of getting even closer to Vivaldi, rather than just doing another translation,” says Pioro. “They’re really trying to ponder what Vivaldi would be writing if he were alive now and using English as his language.” Pioro was clear that Morpurgo should always stay true to his roots as a man of Somerset. “I wanted Michael to understand that he was not writing a pastiche of an Italian. We’re both not being Italian as much as I’m not a period player who is steeped in Baroque Italian technique. But that’s not a hindrance. I feel we are engaging with the purity of an idea. This is not an historical document—it’s an attempt to get inside the brain and the soul of the work rather than restate historical fact.” In line with Morpurgo’s poetical reimaginings is playing of equal freshness and vitality. Together, Pioro and the Manchester Camerata have brought their own drama to every bar of Vivaldi’s music, from the bawdiness of spring’s pastoral dance to winter’s perilous, life-threatening cold. Every movement is presented in a single take, too, which gives the whole a glorious spontaneity. “None of the little ornaments or oddities you hear were necessarily the same on any other take,” says Pioro. “It was very much a matter of listening back to what we recorded, and deciding which we thought captured the spirit of the thing the most and the integrity of thought behind it. We’ve taken a lot of little risks with Vivaldi’s music.” All of which could not have been achieved without the artistic buy-in of the Manchester Camerata. “I felt like I had this group of players who didn’t need to believe my vision, and yet they utterly supported me from the very beginning to the very end. The impression they gave me was that we were all of one mind. They were extraordinary, all of them.” Here, Daniel Pioro takes us exclusively through each movement of his Four Seasons, and shines a light on this extraordinary musical vision for Vivaldi’s great quartet of concertos. Spring—“Allegro” “‘Spring’ is all about the power of nature—there’s not really any humanity involved until the last movement. It was vital to me that we felt like we had dew on our skin, that we could smell the change of the air and the weather. “Near the start, the birds appear. They don’t sing gently and they don’t make music, per se. But they’re extraordinary musical sounds. And so I think this movement should all be played in a way that doesn’t make you think, ‘God, that’s brilliant violin playing,’ but, ‘Yes, this is it. This is spring.’” Spring—“Largo e pianissimo sempre” “The capraro, a goatherd in the Vivaldi’s original words, sleeps. But the dream here is not the picture of sleep in a dream, it’s an actual dream. That could mean that the goatherd goes to weird places. Maybe he dreams of family and an argument, something erotic, something banal. So my improvisations are very much based around flights of fancy. “The viola player traditionally portrays the barking of a dog, but it’s brusque and ugly and unnecessary. The music is much more interesting than that. We decided that if the dog was really barking all the time, the goatherd wouldn’t be able to sleep. So it had to be the memory of a dog barking, or the comfort of remembering the sound of his faithful companion.” Spring—“Danza pastorale. Allegro” “This is Vivaldi’s Rite of Spring, I think. This is one of those movements where if it’s played just like the notes are written, it’s not particularly interesting. But if you engage with the idea of pagan rituals, the sacrifice of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the mania that comes over some animals and people when the flowers start coming out, it’s incredible. It was really important for me that we tapped into folk or traditional music, foot stamping, drones, and ornaments.” Summer—“Allegro non molto” “In the opening bars of ‘Summer,’ we wanted to capture the type of yawning that only happens if you’ve had a siesta for too long—that sheer fatigue from doing nothing, and the summer heat. “Particularly in the first movement, we get snapshots of different things. The cuckoo, this bird, that bird, a hint of the storms to come. It’s like a fast-forward through all the Italian summers.” Summer—“Adagio e piano – Presto e forte” “Here we have the itchy, prickly heat, the uncomfortable sweating, the gnats and the midges with the crack of thunder that punctuates this movement where the orchestra become the thunder itself. “But the question is, is the storm coming our way or is it in the distance in the mountains and moving on to the next town? Of course, we know it’s coming to us, because we know the music. But this is the point—there’s a moment where the storm may be about to pass us by, which is why the last orchestral crash towards the end of this movement has to give us absolutely no doubt that we haven’t escaped it. It’s coming our way.” Summer—“Presto” “We are in the storm, and the storm only exists when we as musicians embody it. So if you don’t do that from note one, if anyone does it passively, it’s not the storm and we’ve belittled the whole thing. This isn’t a retelling of a storm—it’s the storm itself.” Autumn—“Allegro” “‘Autumn’ is the most human. This is all about the human lived experience of being on this earth: harvest, joys, drunkenness, all these things. This is 24 hours in the day of a real old Italian paesano. We have the first day, which is the harvest, and they get drunk and dance. I allow myself to do these almost intentionally ridiculous double-stop ornaments. I’m this sort of pompous character who claims they can do it better than other people. It’s all slightly uncouth and tender. And some of us don’t have teeth and others of us have questionable hygiene. And it’s raw and it’s real and it’s sweet and it’s funny and it’s dirty.” Autumn—“Adagio molto” “We move to the night when everybody is so oversaturated with cheap alcohol. Everyone is asleep—it’s the sleep of drunks. But I just thought, OK, let’s inject a little bit of magical realism into it all. What about if these were types of opioid dreams, or if mushrooms were involved? “So I said to the harpsichordist David Gordon, ‘This is an opioid dream, so please fantasize and find what you find in the moment.’ And the strings just meander from one harmony to the next.” Autumn—“Allegro” “The final movement is a hunt. These are not professional hunters. These are the hungover peasants from the night before—it’s passive hunting. You’ve got one keen person, maybe a teetotal villager, and you hear these little alert horns. But, in general, they want to go hunting, but they don’t really know what they’re doing. It’s not particularly astute. “Then we have nature red in tooth and claw, the violence of death and the dogs and the stag. After the stag dies and the dogs rip it apart and its heart bursts, the hunters just go home. It’s the most limp ending to an extraordinarily brutal scene.” Winter—“Allegro non molto” “Winter is the cataclysm that happens in order for the new to happen. It’s the ending of all things. And I don’t think we’ve fully prayed at the altar of the life-rendering, all-destroying cold. The first movement is stunningly beautiful, but the chattering of teeth is not funny. It’s really, really intense. We chatter our teeth when we have the worst fever you can imagine, when you feel at death’s door. “The very opening shivers, but my brief to the lutenist was to go the other way, to be the slowness that comes in when the body freezes. So he opens with these almost like death knells of slow plucking.” Winter—“Largo” “The second movement is a perfect snapshot of the contentment of people for whom winter is all about beautiful snowfall, a warm house, and Christmas and art. But over the hill, winter is wreaking havoc and people are dying. This contrast was really, really important to me. It’s almost like a horror film.” Winter—“Allegro” “Here we have an in-the-moment description: a child running across frozen ground, the ice cracks and it tumbles and falls… I made a decision that there is an organ and upper strings moment after the ice cracks and the child has fallen, which is like, are we in heaven? Is this a prayer? Is this a processional? There’s a sort of funerary or moment where it’s almost like we are bathed in holy light. And then we are reminded that, no matter what we are experiencing, feeling, or thinking, winter is still raging on. It ends with that winter storm—and once it’s over, it’s over.”