SCO / Kuusisto
City Halls, Glasgow
THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.
Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.
With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.
Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.
The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.
When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.
The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.
It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.
Keith Bruce
Pictured: Ale Carr