The Four Seasons

But the Baroque concert with a living composer? What? What's this

about? Crazy, huh? Well, the initial impetus for the concert was I wanted to do the Four Seasons by Vivaldi with four different student soloists.

So that was kind of the basis of it.

And then a flute player wanted to play, and so we added the B minor flute suite.

But it's really beautifully written, and it's really fun to play it.

Tell me more about the concert.

You mentioned Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Four Seasons with four of the students playing soloists in the group.

Hi, Nina.

Vivaldi Four Seasons, what do you think Marathon Monk is asking?

I don't like Vivaldi that much.

Kind of crazy, crazy, you know, what is it? Controversial opinion.

It's like it didn't sound silly, but you can hear it.

Or if you listen to the Four Seasons, it does the same thing.

You can hear the spring.

And just that it has this...

The name is the four seasons and then summer.

And then your behavior and your emotions are already set because you know this is going to be about summer.

And so the title of the song, like it primes you.

And every morning I give an artist of the day to my boys.

Today it's gonna be Vivaldi, Antonio Vivaldi, because he composed, of course, The Four Seasons, including Autumn, which celebrated, uh, peasant harvest dances and the morning hunts because autumn is here.

It is time for all that.

It is time for elections, and it's time for me to bring you the five I's I bring you at every single show: independence, integrity, information, inspiration, and of course, impact.

And Vivaldi was, uh, a, a normal composer by, by most, uh, people's, uh, assumptions.

But he was, uh, a bit of a womanizer, because, uh, The Four Seasons were supposed to have been about four women he was in love with.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Both of the performances at two and four Sunday afternoon will be in the historic Presbyterian Church in Cane Hill.

Music will include Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and Dvorak's American Quartet.

Both performances are free, but because of limited seating, advance registration is requested.

The Sona Beyond season will continue in November with Mozart's Magic Flute at the Springdale Public Library Saturday, November fourteenth, and the Fayetteville Public Library on Saturday, November twenty-first.

But Mantua gave him two things that would define the rest of his career.

The first was the sketch for what would become The Four Seasons, composed for Count Vaclav von Morzin of Prague, who simultaneously employed Vivaldi from afar as his maestro di musica in Italia, a remote consultancy role requiring only the periodic dispatch of new music, for which Morzin paid Vivaldi more than any other employee on his payroll.

The second, and far more personally significant, was Anna Girò.

Anna Girò was a contralto who arrived in Mantua around seventeen eighteen.

Vivaldi declared of her that to put on an opera without La Gero was simply not possible because a comparable prima donna was nowhere to be found.

In 1725, Vivaldi published the collection that would become one of the most performed and recorded classical music works in history.

His Opus Eight, titled Il Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione, the contest between harmony and invention contained twelve concertos for violin, the first four of which depicted the four seasons of the year.

When the Four Seasons were published, Vivaldi acknowledged in the dedication to Count Morzin that the works had long enjoyed Morzin's kind generosity, meaning the Bohemian count's private ensemble had already been performing them for years.