![]() At the 2013 BBC Proms, Nigel Kennedy (has any artist been so inextricable from one work?) and the Palestine Strings interspersed a fiery reading of the score with mesmerizing improvisatory sequences from Arab folk music, with solos provided by Palestinian violinist Mostafa Saad. It is music robust enough to travel witness Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.” If Vivaldi’s Venice was a city where cultures commingle and share, so too has his work become a meeting place of place and time. But it also has a remarkable capacity to produce innumerable new versions of itself, in kaleidoscopically diverse forms. True, the piece is a commodity for musicians and audiences alike, one whose ubiquitousness breezily undoes classical music’s highfalutin self-regard and rarefied status with each pizza, hotel chain, and Classic FM “Hall of Fame” mention. At the time, she was asked to perform it by three separate promoters the work helped to launch her professional career. “It is not just a violin part with concerto accompaniment, as would be customary at the time.” This is one of the reasons that Humphreys, a self-described “young reactionary,” shed her lingering cynicism towards the work shortly after graduating conservatory. (Anyone who thinks the all-female electric string quartet Bond is somehow cheapening Vivaldi’s music with skin-tight leather and energetic gyration might do well to remember this fact.) And it was in this climate that Vivaldi wrote four violin concerti, one representing each season of the year.Įven to our ears “there is a real modernity to it,” violinist Fenella Humphreys tells me via Zoom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would write admiringly of performances there.īut what on the surface was a charitable and pastoral undertaking was also a lucrative commercial concern and a voyeuristic spectacle-most girls performed semi-concealed, behind grills or screens. ![]() Pietà was one of the city’s four Ospedali Grandi, all of which were renowned as centers of musical excellence that attracted huge audiences from all over Europe to their concerts. Cloistered like nuns, the young girls of the Ospedale received an elite musical training along with their food and shelter. The residents of Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà were orphaned and abandoned girls, among the most vulnerable people in Venetian society and coming from its poorest quarters. Gabriele Bella “Le Lagon Gelé” (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) One can only imagine what the composer, who worked much of his career at an all-girls’ convent-orphanage, would have made of this. In this role, Vivaldi was the literal soundtrack to post-2008 austerity “The Four Seasons” came to represent everything debased and exclusive about classical music. When the DWP retired the music last year, an official told The Guardian: “We had some feedback that the Vivaldi clip caused anxiety for claimants and in particular had an impact on autistic callers.” The Guardian questioned whether there had been any consideration that the psychological effects of Vivaldi’s “pastoral evocation of murmuring streams, softly caressing breezes, and flower-strewn meadows” on “stressed benefit claimants hovering on the edge of destitution in 21st-century Britain.” One 2019 documentary showed a caller sobbing to it. If you were an unemployment or benefit claimant and phoned the helpline for the Department for Work and Pensions between 2006 and last year, you would have likely heard the same 30-second excerpt on loop as hold music. Transport for London wasn’t the only British organization to make use of Vivaldi’s quartet of seasonal concertos (published in 1723 and composed a few years before). Since then, the practice has been widely adopted across all kinds of modern metropolitan spaces, deploying classical music as a form of social cleansing. Realizing that piping classical music into its stations was a cost-effective means to deter young people from hanging around, Transport for London started playing Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven in 2006. Here’s a reason to hate “The Four Seasons”: I last heard “Spring”-unbidden-as I passed through east London’s Walthamstow Bus Station during a routine commute home.
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