VIVALDI: THE FOUR SEASONS BY CANDLELIGHT

How wonderful it always is to experience the music room in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion being used as it was intended. It is the most extraordinary place, a stunning piece of exuberant nonsense created for the extravagant Prince Regent. And it never fails to amaze me how many people I meet who live here in Brighton and have never set foot in one of the most amazing palaces in the world. That said, it amazes me that it does not get the attention it deserves on an international platform, full stop.

Fever Concerts make use of beautiful locations to stage classical concerts globally and I suspect few live up to the lavish chinoiserie of the Royal Pavilion. And to experience that room in, albeit fake, candlelight added a flickering magic to the evening.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons if a familiar work, even those unfamiliar with who wrote it, will surely have heard at least a part of it at some time. It has been plundered for films, TV, advertising and so much more. It’s themes and motifs copied and plagiarised over and over again. So on this occasion it was fascinating to see how the familiar could be presented in so different a way.

At less than 30 minutes long, when played at a leisurely pace, and much less when powered through as it sometimes is, we did wonder how it could sustain a whole programme. But it did, and did so by combining a fine piece of music into an almost lecture format.

Performing the piece we had The Sussex String Quartet, and excellent small ensemble who were playing an arrangement suited, for the most part, to two violins, a viola and a cello. An absence of any kind of programme, printed or digital, makes it difficult for me to name them sadly, but they were fine musicians with a first violin part being delivered assuredly. (And I was not alone in wondering why we were not given access to some kind of information about the musicians and the organisation staging the event)

When I say for the most part I am referring to the second movement of Spring where the quiet balance needed was somewhat lost, with the cello becoming too strident. A small quibble and one that for the rest of the evening was not so evident.

So how did the evening offer a full and rounded entertainment? Well I earlier used the word lecture, which may sound rather off putting but far from it. The viola player introduced the evening by explaining that Vivaldi had written the piece for his students and wondered at how good those student must have been to master this exacting composition. She went on to explain that as well as the four pieces, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, he had written four sonnets. These she went on to read and then with her fellow musicians demonstrated how the composer had illustrated elements of his poetry, birds, storms, horse riders, gunshots… and it worked. Maybe purists and academics might have found it intrusive, but the presentation and explanation was charmingly handled and never patronising.

Musically the quartet formatting worked, there was a clarity to the arrangement that sat well with the interspersing of the passages with their demonstrations and a lucidity to their playing that worked in a similar fashion. I’ve heard it played faster, and louder yes, but this rendering had an appropriate chamber feel for a performance in the exotic intimacy of our royal palace.

Andrew Kay

12 July

The Royal Pavilion Music Room

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