V.come weekend vote: Which is your favorite of Vivaldi's Four Seasons?

September 22, 2024 at 07:27 AM · I can't decide...love 'em all!

September 22, 2024 at 03:18 PM ·

I have never really much cared for any of the Four Seasons concerti. I can listen to them, and I've done that on occasion. But, I don't get much from the experience.

However, take the double-concertos recorded by Stern and Oistrakh, or the Gloria, and we're taking real music. It gets different with other music, but not much better. I also like the Concerto for Four Violins. (The one that Bach liked.)

While it would be pointless for me to pick out my "favorite" Season of the four, I don't mind picking a performance that I think stands out. I have a CD of Henryk Szeyring playing the Four Seasons that I think is very good.

September 22, 2024 at 04:33 PM · I bought my first, and what has turned out to be my favorite recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons concerti in 1958 (the year it was released) for $4.98 (the sticker is still on the LP jacket). The violin soloist was Werner Krotzinger with Karl Munchinger conducting the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. I think I now have a total of about 2 dozen CD and video recordings of "The Seasons" from my search for any improvement and do not feel I have ever found an equal.

I see the LP in the identical jacket beeing offered for $109 on ebay.

In my opinion, a more recent Stuttgart CO CD of the 4 Seasons does not measure up. A few years ago the old (1858) recording was released on a CD.

My favorite of the 4 concertos is the fourth, WINTER. Upon first listening to it I was so moved by the love song that is the 2nd movement that I purchased the music for all 4 concertos and worked on that one especially. More than 20 years later I found the score and all the parts (in a music store in Bethesda, MD - on a work trip to DC) and later performed the 10 minute Winter Concerto with my community orchestra. Although I already had a version of the solo part, this new one (an Italian edition) sounded to me like the same bowings used on that first recording I had purchased more than 20 years earlier.

More than a decade after that I performed the slow movement of Winter again at the wedding of the daughter of a very dear friend using a string quartet for the accompaniment. Hard for me to believe, even that was about 32 years ago.

September 22, 2024 at 04:59 PM · I join those who won't or can't decide which is their favorite. My initial contact with the series was in a performance in the Tonhalle in Zurich of which I don't remember any detail except that someone recited the poems before each season (in Italian!).

When I was a teenager someone gave me a recording as a birthday present. The conductor was--of all people--Stokowski. I don't have the LP any more but I remember it was quite good, the soloist (whose name I forget, maybe the concertmaster) beautifully singing where appropriate. The only negative thing I remember was the exaggerated echo effects in some of the movements.

By coincidence I listened to all 4 concerti in the Harnoncourt recording on youtube last night. If you want to hear a really wild version this is one for you. Some of the episodes are marvelous (the birds in the spring, the drunk in the fall for example), others are just bad (most obviously the slow movement of the winter). And all the movement endings are ripped off like a perforated paper towel. Bonus: Harnoncourt missed the cuckoo too; the cuckoo call disappears due to the wild tempo the passage is played at. This is not unique to this version though. The tempo in which a real cuckoo sings is andante, not allegro and certainly not prestissimo--a soloist would have to slow down the two notes with an extreme rubato to make them audible and interpretable to people who don't read the score with the explaining notes. I admit I had never heard this passage as the cuckoo either.

September 22, 2024 at 07:32 PM · All four are definitely good music, but i voted for Winter because it is more dramatic and therefore somewhat more exciting than others.

This entire "cycle" is in my opinion a typical example of a high quality piece that unfortunately suffers greatly from extreme overexposure: it is so egregiously over-performed just about everywhere for the last four or five decades that it has become very hard to really enjoy it anymore to the degree that it truly deserves.

September 22, 2024 at 10:21 PM · I don't think the music suffers from over exposure. Maybe just some listeners.

As I wrote above, my performance was over 40 years ago, but the last time I heard it was about 10 or so years ago when one of our orchestra's hired coaches gave us $5 concert passes to the concert she played it with the New Century Chamber ORCHESTRA (she was a regular member of that ensemble) while Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was the director. It was exciting because each movement was soloed by a different one of the ensemble's 12 violinists (including our coach).

September 22, 2024 at 10:23 PM · Won't or can't choose. But there are a couple of oddities radio 3 played last year by l'arte dell'arca(?) and another multi- instrumental one, both with more zest than the usual. My first ever CD was a late, staid Menuhin version that lasted more than 70 mins, and my 2nd hand CD player always stopped about a minute before the end.

Mark is right, it's over-performed. I heard someone playing one of them on the cello the other day, and I thought, Vivaldi wrote how many cello concerti, and the guy has to play the 4 seasons?

September 23, 2024 at 05:49 PM · Winter. The Harnoncourt recording is a revelation. Another + vote for the Oistrakh-Stern recording of Vivaldi double concertos. The only drawback of the 4 Seasons is that it is overplayed. The 100-200 other Vivaldi violin concertos, that are not in the Suzuki books, are rarely done.

The opening chord sequence of Winter was also used in an aria from one of his operas "Ice in my Veins". I don't know which was written first. Vivaldi opera arias are great and give us a clue for the playing style of the middle movements of Vivaldi violin concertos.

I will always remember; I was playing the Winter solo with a small orchestra in a church when a storm came through. There was a lightning strike at the same moment as the lighting in the music(!) that put the lights out for about a long 5 seconds. We played through it, with audience laughter.

September 23, 2024 at 05:58 PM · Making my point literally clearer: overexposure certainly does not hurt the music itself (just as underexposure does not either), but it does hurt the piece's impact for listeners as well as our perception of its quality.

September 23, 2024 at 08:06 PM · 4 seasons, played by Arthur Grumiaux, was my very first classical album, at the time, on music cassette tape! he plays this incredibly clean and classical. actually listening a lot to that already taught me a lot as a child violinist: to me it was a miracle how he could play all these passages so cleanly.

September 24, 2024 at 10:37 AM · I first heard the Four Seasons in an I Musici recording. I think they pioneered the small 'sports car' approach to baroque. The concertmaster in those years was the Spanish violinist Felix Ayo. I was dazzled by both the music and the performance.

September 24, 2024 at 10:11 PM · Hard to pick a favorite, so I didn’t vote. I like hearing all four played at one sitting - to feel the contrast between one season and the next. I find the dramatic tensions in Winter and Summer to be among the standout points. I notice that these two, at this hour, hold first place and second place, respectively, in voting.