Vivaldi: La Quattro Stagione (Dresden Version with Winds) (LP)

This stunning new interpretation of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons features extraordinary violinist Federico Guglielmo and his L’Arte dell Arco baroque ensemble, who join forces for an incredible interpretive event. The idea behind it was this: Vivaldi wrote quite a bit of music for the Dresden court and its famous orchestra. Its wind instrumentalists were Europe’s best, so that the Concerti con molti strumenti – that is, for many solo instruments – were its specialty. For this orchestra Pisendel also arranged works originally written exclusively for strings. So why not The Four Seasons – tone paintings making them perfect choices for a more colourful instrumentation? Guglielmo’s ‘rewriting’ was based on a musicological comparison of all the available concertos in which Vivaldi employed a full complement of solo wind instruments. Spring, for example, is assigned recorders, oboes, horns, and a bassoon – and suddenly everything blossoms in much fuller instrumental colour. Klassik.com wrote: ‘An extremely fascinating experiment, and its result can be admired on this exemplarily edited CD with its overwhelmingly realistic tone pictures. These concertos have only rarely been realized more grippingly, vividly, expressively, and poetically.’