You also won’t want to miss the English translations of the sonnet, broken into subtitles and timed to appear at the exact place where they appear in Vivaldi’s 300 year-old score. The pleasure these virtuosos take in Vivaldi and each other is a delight. As tempting as it is to savor these joyful sounds with ears alone, we recommend taking it in with your eyes, too. Multiple stationery cameras ensured that the mostly standing performers’ spontaneous physical responses to the music and each other would not pass unremarked. We didn’t want something that looked like a concert, with a CD playing in the background. We stopped when we got to the point that it sounded like sitting in the audience. We did tests where we sat in the audience listening to the mix. Voices of Music co-directors David Tayler and Hanneke van Proosdij were adamant that these high quality audio recordings would leave listeners feeling as if they are in the same room with the musicians and their baroque instruments.

The San Francisco-based early music ensemble, Voices of Music does so beautifully, above, with a video playlist of live performances given between 20, with the four concertos edited to be presented in their traditional order. Remembering that Vivaldi himself was a great innovator, we suggest that there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from all that to revisit the original flavor. Drums, synths, an electric guitar, a Chinese pipa, an Indian sarangi, a pair of Inuit throat singers, a Japanese a cappella women’s chorus, a Theremin and a musical saw are among those to have taken a stab at The Four Seasons’ drowsing goatherd, barking dog, and twittering birdies. The last hundred years, however, have seen a wide range of instruments and interpretations. The composer studded his score with precisely placed lines from the sonnets, to convey his expectations that the musicians would use their instruments to sonically embody the experiences being described.įor two hundred years, musicians cleaved closely to Vivaldi’s original orchestration.

Vivaldi four seasons baroque