Four Seasons a fresh triumph
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra directed by Vesa-Matti Leppa¨nen with Anna van der Zee, Malavika Gopal, Simeon Broom and Alan Molina (all violin). Music by Vivaldi and Piazzolla. Wellington College, May 8.
Reviewed by Max Rashbrooke.
I had low expectations, I’ll admit: what was yet another performance of Four Seasons going to tell me about this well-worn piece? Plenty, as it turned out.
Things were livened up from the outset by readings from the poems that had originally accompanied Vivaldi’s composition. Another nice touch was to have one soloist per season, each drawn from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s ranks.
Admittedly, the opening movement, Spring, didn’t land well. Both soloist Anna van der Zee and the orchestra played with a metallic tone that felt far too clean, lacking the swelling warmth and softness of new life, and the dynamics were off on some of the call-and-answer passages.
Things picked up, though, as the wheel turned to Summer. Soloist Alan Molina was magnificent in his tight, rhythmically intricate interplay with cellist Ken Ichinose, and the later parts of the movement were suffused with a slow, sweltering tension.
In Autumn, Malavika Gopal delighted with a fuller, rounder tone and an absolutely secure technique. The orchestra also distinguished themselves in passages where the crisp notes of the harpsichord delicately punctured the murmuring flow of the strings.
A performance that throughout privileged musical communication and storytelling reached its pinnacle in the final movement, Winter, where the opening was like shivering itself, an evocation of iciness on a par with classics like the Cold Genius’s solo in Purcell’s King Arthur.
Splendid, too, was the decision to pair the Vivaldi with Astor Piazzolla’s modern, tango-laced take on the Four Seasons, Las Cuatro Estaciones Porten˜ as, as arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov and with the same four soloists, albeit in different order.
Van der Zee seemed far more poised in her rendition of Autumn, her lyrical solos hinting at sepia evenings and riverside dusk. Broom’s Winter, meanwhile, had moments of transcendent beauty, balancing the lamentation of the slow passages with a propulsive energy later on.
Gopal then conjured up what was a very dark Spring indeed, leaning into harsh sounds that could have been labelled unmusical were they not, in a sense, the very opposite. In both Spring and Summer, Piazzolla’s wit was on full display, with playful references back to the Vivaldi original. The latter movement was a masterful kaleidoscope containing everything from jagged virtuoso passages to the smoothest of tango song lines.
It was a completely coherent performance – the poetry, the soloists, the orchestra, the brilliant pairing of Vivaldi and Piazzolla. What might have seemed old and stale reappeared as vivid and fresh. In short, a triumph.