The Red Priest himself - Antonio Vivaldi
Vivaldi is one of the
most famous Venetians in history. As such his work has been at the forefront of
some of the material created for the Lights Of Venice project at the Venetian
Hotel in Las Vegas.
In choosing music for
the piece “Canaletto”, a very modern visual celebration of that artist’s
Venetian panoramas, I favoured parts of some of my favourite Vivaldi pieces,
namely his Lute and Mandolin concertos.
The Four Seasons
concerti are exceptional and innovative pieces of music, not only fulfilling
expected conditions of form and structure but containing the creation of poetic
scenes using music to suggest changes in weather conditions, animals, people.
Today these works are often taken for granted as they are so well known but his
use of melody & harmony and his contribution to chamber music is unique,
his skill and imagination influenced other greats such as J. S. Bach.
The Four Seasons
concerti were never far from our minds though and we had discussed presenting
the natural turning of the year with his music for almost a year before this
year’s 'Winter In Venice' theme gave us the opportunity to do so.
The Hotel wrote a
story based on some traditional Winter legends from Italy including the figure
of Befana. It was decided that a
character, Amadora, as a goddess figure, was going to be depicted as being
responsible for moving the year from one season to the next.
We saw this as a good
marriage between their story and our theme and so our latest piece 'Four
Seasons' was born.
The first part is a
short introduction written based on harmonies found in the Winter concerto.
After this introduction, the piece moves through each season until we get to
Winter once more.
In re-arranging
sections of each concerto I was keen to not remove its original soundworld of
strings and harpsichord altogether but to take them and weave them closely to
both Vivaldi’s seasonal inspirations and our visual ideas.
For ‘Spring’, Vivaldi
created passages which mimic the sound of birdsong & I decided to explore those passages more deeply,
to see just how closely those phrases match with real birdsong. This followed on
from the experiment with the Nuthatch as part of the ‘Yorkshire’ section of
“Rose” in 2010. Vivaldi's scoring matches birdsong construction closely. In my birdsong recordings, simple birdsong patterns found
identical phrases in this passage. The result for our piece is a combination of flute &
pizzicato strings weaving with bird recordings, building up a back and forth
conversation against a background of April garden sounds I recorded in Naples,
Pompeii and Herculaneum in 2011.
For Summer, I decided
to focus on the section known as the Storm. The fast passages of the lower
strings reminded me of the drone of buzzing bees and further investigation
showed the register of those figures and actual bee sounds occupy the same
range. I found a bee recording which buzzed on the tonic and the bee’s flight
through Summer, complete with dandelion collisions came to be.
Autumn has
time-honoured community based traditions of harvest, wine-making,
fruit-gathering, preparing for winter. It seemed appropriate then to use ‘La
Caccia” from that concerto and arrange it with a folk dance feel. The harpsichord
& solo violin took position as main instruments & are driven by
percussion from Renaissance drum samples and tambourine.
Vivaldi’s ability to
paint the sense of bare fragility and icy cold in the opening of the Winter
Concerto is a wonderful piece of musical soundscaping. I decided to take his
scoring and put it in the hands of glass instruments of various origins, struck
and bowed, layered to build each tone and sound very carefully.
An Ondes Martenot was
used very simply, to provide a careful round toned bass line before the strings
joined for the climactic moment where the theme begins. This accompanied a
beautiful visual sequence of the Torre dell’Orologio gradually being frozen
over, layer by layer, cold colours flashing over its new glassy surface.
‘Four Seasons’ runs at
the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas every night throughout the 2012/13 Winter
season as part of the ‘Winter In Venice’ programme.
