Perth Festival: The New Four Seasons
Il Giardino d’Amore, Stefan Plewniak (violinist/director)
Perth Concert Hall; 29/05/24
Founded in 2012 at the Bach Festival in Kraków by Polish violinist/conductor Stefan Plewniak, Il Giardino d’Amore is a chamber orchestra of European musicians (and choir) specialising in performance of early music on period instruments. Their recently devised show, ‘The New 4 Seasons,’ featuring just the string ensemble with Stefan as the soloist, is a multimedia presentation celebrating next year’s tricentenary of the publication in Amsterdam of Vivaldi’s popular masterpiece, the set of four quasi-programmatic violin concerti known as ‘Le quattro stagioni’. ‘The New 4 Seasons’ received its premiere on the night of Wednesday 29th May in Perth Concert Hall, as part of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts.
The music is a fusion of the Vivaldi originals with Astor Piazzolla’s 1969 ‘Estaciones Porteñas’ (the seasons as 4 tangos, as experienced by a Buenos Aires native) and German-English composer Max Richter’s ‘recomposition’ of 2012, mostly based on richly ornamented loops of Vivaldi original phrases. Piazzolla’s tangos are not particularly programmatic, so his odd performing order, starting with Summer, was preserved and fused with the more usual Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter order of the others. The fusion was absolute. Each concerto had three movements, each movement with elements from all three composers, with all transitions seamless and some elements mixed. Thus, the four concerti filled out the evening’s programme. Clearly, much thought and artistry had gone into the arranging.
The playing was vital and compelling, with explosive energy and thrilling virtuosity. The string ensemble stood in a semicircle, with the bassist on a stool and the two cellists seated on a slightly raised platform. Stefan prowled balletically and wolfishly in the intervening space. The rhythmic attack in the faster parts of the tangos and the Vivaldi elements was volcanic. A pastoral calm suffused the less manic elements of the slow movements. It was clear that the musicians were committed to each other, to the music, and to their mission to communicate it with the utmost advocacy. The result was a challenging but rewarding listen.
A large screen above and behind the musicians carried the motion picture projection that was the visual element. The shifting moods of the music were echoed in the diverse moving images. These did include some footage of moving through landscape with seasonal elements (including a violent thunderstorm), but mostly they involved living things, including timelapse images of plants growing and animated graphics of flocks of birds, schools of fish and jellyfish superimposed on static colour backgrounds. Most of all, though, the human element dominated, with footage of intimate and tactile dancing and close-ups of skin texture and tone, eyes, hair and facial expressions. The visual element heightened the aural experience and was no less artistically driven.
The perspicacious reader may be sensing a ‘but’. There are a few. The Irish word ‘geaitsí’, approximately pronounced ‘gyaa-chee’ and often translated mildly as ‘antics’, will be pressed into service. Stefan’s geaitsí were not confined to the wolfish prowling but frequently extended to foot-stamping, grunts and groans. I found that this wore a bit thin with me. Occasionally, a high-pitched whistle (which sounded electronic in origin rather than anything that could be produced organically from a period instrument) seemed to emanate from his violin. Puzzlingly unnecessary. Equally unnecessary, I felt, was the thick fog of dry ice (or some similar gimmick) which permeated my beloved Gannochy Auditorium (and was diffusing the dim light) on arrival and had mostly dispersed by the end of the evening. The stage too was dimly lit (the players’ music stands were illuminated in the manner of those in an operatic pit), so that when the house lights were darkened, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, much less read the programme. I am never destined to be a fan of this practice of ‘keeping the audience in the dark’, whether literally or metaphorically.
There was a beautiful, if bizarre, encore. Four pupils of Stefan, all from Oslo, played a close-harmony arrangement of “a folksong, not exactly Scottish; a bit Australian” – ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Really excellent.
‘The New 4 Seasons’ is undeniably an extraordinary multisensory experience born of consummate artistic vision and virtuosity, with a compulsion to communicate the artists’ shared love of the music. I can certainly recommend it, but only with the caveat that, for this reviewer at least, there are unignorable annoyances to be navigated.