Tributes to Vivaldi

In the Vivaldi episode of his PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, the violinist-conductor Scott Yoo describes The Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi’s most famous composition, as the embodiment of the composer’s “two opposing musical passions, the Church [Vivaldi was a Catholic priest] and the opera, brought together with his virtuosity.”

“It’s a sacred instrumental opera,” Yoo concludes, “with the violin as the star.”

It also may be the most-recorded piece of music in the world. And, based on the latest releases by the violinists Fenella Humphreys, Camille and Julie Berthollet, and Piotr Pławner, a strong argument can be made that it’s one of the most influential pieces of music in the world as well.

Each of the albums takes inspiration from and pays inventive homage to Vivaldi’s programmatic masterpiece. In the case of the Berthollet sisters’ Nos 4 Saisons (Warner Classics), the tribute involves a brisk performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in its entirety plus the addition of four seasonally themed French folk songs of their own. Pławner’s Philip Glass: Violin Concerto No. 2: ‘American Four Seasons’ (Naxos), on the other hand, contains no (literal) Vivaldi at all. As for the title piece of Humphreys’ The Four Seasons Recomposed (Rubicon)—rendered with clarity and verve by Humphreys and the Ben Palmer–conducted Covent Garden Sinfonia—it is, in the estimation of its composer Max Richter, about 25 percent Vivaldi.

The 75 percent that isn’t Vivaldi reflects Richter’s efforts to cut, paste, loop, and riff his way through a great work that by his own admission he had fallen out of love with due to overexposure. And it’s impressively rich, especially coming from a post-minimalist (i.e., somewhat minimalist) composer whose music is sometimes dismissed as derivative and vapid even at its loveliest.

The same goes for Glass, a peerless popularizer of absolute music about whose minimalism there has seldom been anything “post.” His American Four Seasons, the broodingly overcast nature of which Pławner, the pianist Gerardo Vila, and the Berner Kammerorchester faithfully convey, evinces audible engagement with an outside world more multifarious than Glass’ inner one.

But, rewarding though Pławner’s, Humphreys’, and the Berthollets’ recordings are, perhaps the best way to enjoy them is to divide each into three approximately 20-minute segments and to stagger the segments. Absorbed in this way, the pieces comment not only on Vivaldi but also on one another. There’s give, there’s take. And more often than you’d expect, they even seem to complete one another’s sentences.

At one point in his Vivaldi episode, Scott Yoo observes that by influencing Bach, who in turn influenced the likes of Beethoven and Mozart (who in turn influenced every other composer worth his or her salt), Vivaldi can be heard in practically every piece of exquisite music that has been composed in his wake. These three albums make that assertion hard to dispute.