Bach even made solo keyboard arrangements of seven of them-but didn’t select any from The Four Seasons. Johann Sebastian Bach had great interest in the music of Vivaldi, and his own instrumental concertos are modeled on the form established by his predecessor-usually in three movements with the first and last movement in “ritornello” form, in which an introductory musical statement is repeated throughout, sometimes only in fragments, in different keys, the iterations separated by freely composed flights of fancy. The Four Seasons were just the first four concertos in a collection of 12 published by Vivaldi under the title Il cimento dell’ armonia e dell’ inventione, “The Contest Between Harmony and Invention.” How many music listeners are familiar with numbers 5 through 12? Are we expected to believe that the first four of that collection are so vastly superior to the eight that followed them? Think about it: How likely is it that the musical world actually compared these four concertos to the more than 500 that Vivaldi composed, and then decided these were the best? The Four Seasons, in fact, weren’t published as a simple collection of four concertos in the 18th century, composers usually published works in six-packs, like beer, or by the dozen, like jelly donuts. Strange as it may sound, it probably isn’t the music itself that accounts for it. Such breadth vividly demonstrates the phenomenal popularity of The Four Seasons, but doesn’t explain it. More recently at Ravinia, in 2013, violinist Daniel Hope, conductor Tito Muñoz, and the Chicago Philharmonic performed a radical deconstruction by Max Richter, whose minimalist score incorporates snippets of Vivaldi’s score along with electronica and found sounds. Commissioned by Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman, the arrangement proved so popular that it returned the following festival season in 2004. They have also been the subject of myriad reinterpretations, such as a 1977 recording by The New Koto Ensemble of Japan or a salsa arrangement entitled Los Sazones, which trombonist Jimmy Bosch performed at Ravinia with his band Salsa Dura in conjunction with Baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan conducting members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2003. Martin in the Fields to today’s trendy interpretations on “authentic” period instruments. They have been recorded well over a hundred times, and it is a testimony to the endurance of Vivaldi’s music that they have withstood a dazzling range of performance styles, everything from full symphonic performances conducted by the likes of Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy to middle-of-the-road readings by such ensembles as I Musici or the Academy of St. Since then, movements from the set have been used in literally hundreds of films, from 1967’s Elvira Madigan to last year’s box-office hits Sing and The Secret Life of Pets, and in television series as diverse as The Sopranos, American Horror Story, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Simpsons-not to mention countless TV commercials. And The Four Seasons themselves didn’t become really popular until violinist Louis Kaufmann performed them on a CBS Radio broadcast in 1950. ![]() It wasn’t always that way like most music composed before 1750, Vivaldi’s works were virtually forgotten until the chance discovery of his personal collection of his manuscripts in 1926 awakened scholarly interest. Probably the only works that might come close in a popular vote would be Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos and Handel’s Water Music, but Vivaldi’s Four Seasons have entered the collective consciousness as few musical works ever have. ![]() ![]() ![]() If a beauty pageant was held for the orchestral works of the Baroque period, odds are the hands-down winner would be Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the set of four violin concertos that the Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire will perform in the Martin Theatre on July 27, replete with the period flavor of their 1725 publishing.
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