IN ITALIAN

The Chamber Music Society of Detroit
Saturday, December 4th, 2021

ARTISTS
Pascale Beaudin, soprano
Charles Brink, flute
Olivier Brault & Andrew Fouts, violin solo
Mary Riccardi, violin 
Kristen Linfante, viola, 
Loretta O’Sullivan, cello,
Anne Trout, bass, 
Scott Pauley, lute
Andrew Appel, harpsichord & director

The Program
A. Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
M. P. de Montéclair: La Morte di Lucretia
J. S. Bach: Non sa che sia dolore, Cantata BWV 209 

To hear the final joyous aria from Bach's Italian Cantata CLICK HERE

What is it about Vivaldi’s series of concertos, The Four Seasons, that entices us to return season after season? How is it that every time we hear the chirping of birds and barking of dog, the peasant dance of Spring, the languor of stultifying heat, buzzing flies and violent storms of Summer, the afternoon nap and hunt of Fall and the rain at the window while sitting by the fire of Winter we are engaged, moved, and thrilled by the images and vitality that Vivaldi conjures in his invisible art of music? How is it that musicians who might say, “Oh! The Four Seasons AGAIN?,” launch into a movement finding brilliance and challenges in each concerto.
Vivaldi is greatly over-rated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.
Igor Stravinsky

First, let’s clarify. Vivaldi’s reputation has suffered from disparaging remarks in our times. There are two considerations when assessing these insults. First, if J. S. Bach was fundamentally changed by Vivaldi’s work, if Bach felt that the brilliance he recognized in Vivaldi’s music was powerful enough to have him reconsider the way he composed his own music, vocal and instrumental, then we need to look with more care. Bach knew better than we, even better than Stravinsky. Second, I imagine that Stravinsky never heard a non-mechanical performance of a Vivaldi concerto. Until fairly recently, conductors and players were arrested by the repeated patterns in Vivaldi. Performers were petrified by each tree and were blind to the enchanted forest. They did not ride the waves of energy but hammered out the repetitive detail. For decades we were offered sewing machine interpretations of Baroque masterpieces that should affect us like the winds and surf, unpredictable, sometimes gentle, and at other times dizzying.

Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concertos. Most of them are abstract music. They are about the power of pure sound and the communicative quality of harmony, rhythm, melody, and counterpoint. They are energy factories and the music is so vital that we forget that there is hardly any other music that flies by with such life force. They have the naturalness of the wind that cannot be stopped. They are like Carnival in Venice or a street performance of Commedia del Arte. There is no time to analyze what is happening. There is no reason to ask who is behind that mask, or why this or that was said on stage. We are at the happy mercy of Vivaldi, the magician who has taken over our pulse and over the world’s time. We are on Antonio’s roller coaster! I know of no other composer until Stravinsky in Le Sacre de Printemps, who can conjure up energy and force in this way.

In listening to these abstract concertos we often think they are symmetrical and predictable. This is an illusion. When you are in the ensemble playing you must count. You cannot listen and think you know when your next entry occurs. In fact, these works are constantly surprising. They are tricky. Vivaldi makes compositional choices that keep the music fresh and engaging.

From time to time Vivaldi chooses to put an image or a full program to a concerto. Storms at sea, night, the lark, appear as an added defining direction and pulls our own memory into the music. Vivaldi’s connected series of four concertos, The Seasons, is unique in his output, though not unique in art history.

Artists from all periods can find inspiration in a series. Rubens excelled in his Marie de Medici arriving in France; The Unicorn tapestries representing the five senses at Cluny in Paris; The twelve months as illustrated in late 14th century prayer book Les Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc du Berry; The continents as seen in statues and fountains throughout Europe: The Frick Collection’s Progress of Love by Fragonard.

Vivaldi offered us a series of the seasons as compelling and delightful as any in any art form. Written in Venice, published in Amsterdam, they became a rage throughout Europe. A Vivaldi fad in Paris saw imitation by the most important French instrumentalists who wrote concerto after concerto in the Vivaldi mold. Blavet, the greatest French flute virtuoso transcribed Spring as work for solo flute!

Just as any other great work with a program or narrative in mind, these concertos can be heard with no knowledge of a story and satisfy as pure music. But in Vivaldi’s case, the sonnets he wrote to clarify his intentions allow us to laugh, sigh, remember, and delight in our shared experience of the changing year with rituals and expectations that come with each season.

Sometimes these images need to be known. The viola, marked “LOUD” in the second movement of Spring is the barking of the dog. Summer has buzzing flies, a delicious nap and the ever-vigilant dog now asleep. What an amazing sketch by Tiepolo. What a delicious musical moment. Similarly in the second movement of Winter, Vivaldi gives us the other exquisite melody of the series. Here, the violin sings with contentment and comfort at the fire while pizzicato accompanying strings illustrate the sound of cold rain against the windows. Wet and cold reign outside yet our hearts are warmed by the violinist’s lyrical song. Do we know of other works that balance the pure physical beauty of melody with engaging, playful descriptive clatter?

How do we, as performers and interpreters approach this music? You may think that the roadmap of images is so clear that we are forced into a mold of performance that leaves little of the freedom we feel in an abstract work. Not at all!

What about that chorus of birds at the beginning of Spring? Are they far off, the way we might hear them as we take an early morning walk in Tuscany in distant hills slowly getting clearer and clearer, or are they a cacophony of screaming crows similar to Rameau’s wonderful harpsichord work, La Rappel des Oiseaux? In the peasant dance that is the third movement of Spring, do we play the open 5th, imitating the bagpipes of peasants as a raucous dirt floor of sound or give it the innocence and delicacy of a musette? The poor fox scampering for its life and the gun shots and the galloping of horses in Fall all ask for the imagination of the performers to bring these tapestries to life. Of course performers can breeze through the familiar works and give you a clean reading. We will not accept this lazy professionalism from an acting company in Hamlet and we must never accept this from musicians in the face of familiar masterworks. The Four Seasons are worthy of your repeated listening and require and reward the musician for reliving each Season with his or her full imagination at work.

I grew up in New York City and one of the first works of art that became dear to me was the tapestry series, The Hunt of the Unicorn at the Cloisters. My mother took me to see them when I was five or six. She wanted me to know the damsel, the hunters, the dogs, the foxes and ducks, the beautiful and endangered unicorn, certainly the most beautiful animal in creation. And finally the Milles Fleurs tapestry in which all the glory of imagination and magic are captured in a round paddock set in a field of flowers. Now at seventy, the joy of seeing these works has not faded but only increased as my life experience has filled the weavings with more meaning that I could have known at six. And so it is with Vivaldi’s evocation of the seasons. What reason could I have to miss any springtime? What reason might we have to miss a performance of Vivaldi’s springtime?

The lure of Italy:

The Ancient world & unleashed passion.
Four Nations enriches the program with the works of two composers who admired, emulated, and adopted the Italian spirit, Montéclair and Bach. Both composers were formed by rich local traditions and styles of music, at the Parisian opera house and in the German organ loft. Masters of their national styles, they were vulnerable to the allure of the “new” music coming from Rome and Venice. They were inspired by the expressive and exaggerated use of dissonance and dynamic harmony in the works of Alessandro Scarlatti, Corelli and Vivaldi. They loved the sound of Italian words, perfectly suited to singing. The great French composer Rameau tells us at the end of his life that his only regret was that he did not study in Italy. Poussin, the quintessential French painter spent the majority of his life in Rome. Montéclair along with Couperin and Leclair composed in Italian costume on many occasions.

Michel Pignolet de Montéclair published important books of French cantatas and included a few with Italian texts and stylistic inclinations. We bring you his finest in The Death of Lucrezia. Here he calls upon the rude expressiveness of shocking dissonance and modulation to paint the broken heart and disturbed mind of this classical heroine after her rape and before her suicide.

Bach’s Italian masquerade is pure joy. His cantata opens with a sinfonia in the form of a concerto for flute and strings. Bach knew and cherished the works of Vivaldi, almost always in the Venetian solo concerto form. But Bach was not a composer to fall into any preset mold. He takes this format, so well balanced and clear and combines it with the Italian three-section aria form. In the da capo aria, the singer sings an extended A section, moves onto a somewhat contrasting B section and then returns to repeat the A section. When Handel uses this formula for his opera and oratorio arias he is able to explore the motivation and psychology of his characters unlike any Italian opera composer of his time. Bach’s more complicated music allows us to better understand his compositional choices, always challenging and fulfilling. Now, in this sinfonia, he pens a full concerto for the flute and then adds a B section of contrasting character and returns to the opening concerto. He combines the forms of a concerto with the da capo aria to produce and extended and engaging work. How this annoyed his contemporaries but how he satisfies us today.

The cantata then proceeds with two recitatives and two extended arias. They are duos for the soprano and flute. They are easy to admire and love and the final aria is one of the most ebullient works of the master.

After almost two years in which we were all in an extended and difficult journey, Four Nations is delighted to leave you with a wish and image of smooth sailing and a joyful future of beautiful seasons and sublime music.

Andrew Appel

November 24, 2021
Hillsdale NY

Four Nation’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathie Hochal and the New York State Legislature.