Il Giardino d’Amore
Perth Concert Hall
Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the first performance of the Red Priest’s most popular piece, The Four Seasons. Not only has Vivaldi’s suite launched the career of many a young virtuoso – notably Nigel Kennedy round these parts – but it spearheaded the growth of popular interest in early music.
Around the time Kennedy brought his electric violin “new” Four Seasons to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in 2012, Polish violinist Stefan Plewniak was departing from Jordi Savall’s Le Concert de Nations to set up his own group for a performance at Krakow’s Bach Festival.
Il Giardino d’Amore has since travelled the globe and made acclaimed recordings, most recently of Gluck’s Orfeo e Eurydice with singers Jakub Jozef Orlinski, Fatima Said and Elsa Dreisig for Warner Classics, but this was the group’s Scottish debut and also – although Perth Festival made little of the fact – the premiere of Plewniak’s new project: The New 4 Seasons.
Following the calendar from Spring through to Winter, Plewniak and his dozen younger accomplices – some of them his own students from Norway – teamed Vivaldi’s evocation of the annual cycle with Astor Piazzola’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires from the 1960s and Max Richter’s 21st century “Re-composition” of the Venetian’s 1725 work.
The nuevo tango pieces – more individual in character – sensibly prefaced each season (thus re-ordering Piazzola’s preference), before the original and Richter’s response were combined together. With an interval between Summer and Autumn, the whole made for a satisfying evening, if one where the Perth audience seemed unsure when to applaud and sensibly just sat on their hands until the end of each half.
The other element of the presentation was visual, with a haze over the stage to diffuse the lighting plot, and projections of the natural world and dancing bodies on a screen above the players. Some of this was as inconsequential as a screensaver, but it was generally inoffensive and occasionally more interesting in its close-ups of people and time-lapse photography of germination and bloom.
Musically, although the opening resolved into the Piazzola, it began with a provocatively tentative fade-in of period-instrument rawness and that “authentic” element was never away – not least in some occasionally wayward tuning. It was balanced, however, by some lush and lovely ensemble playing with obligatos from the first cello Niamh Malloy as well as the leader and director. If Spring was a season of settling into the expanded suite, the sunny opening of Summer immediately spoke of an assemblage that actually enhanced the programme’s individual ingredients.
If that was true of the old war horse that is the Vivaldi, it was as applicable to the Richter. Although the music itself could appear as down-tempo padding, or respite for the musicians, interweaving it with its Baroque inspiration made the German composer’s intentions evident.
It made for a much more arrestingly inventive evening of music-making than, say, the concert of Italian music from Nicola Benedetti’s Baroque ensemble at the pandemic-era Edinburgh Festival.
When he spoke at the end, before an encore of Waltzing Matilda that was less cheesy than that sounds, Plewniak was engagingly enthusiastic about bringing his group to Scotland. He included a winning “four seasons in one day” gag about the local weather, and there was something of waltz king Andre Rieu’s swagger in his stage-centre soloist’s role. It is not impossible that Perth Festival may have been in on the ground floor of a very successful project with this low-key first night.
Keith Bruce
