Strings of steel: a sensually displacing variant on Vivaldi and Astor Piazzolla’s "Four Seasons"
Crossing between works scribed two and a half centuries apart, Joshua Bell fused mostly homogeneous renditions of the contrasts to create a single mammoth of a season.
Photo credit: BBC Proms/Chris Lee
Prescient of the playful counterpoint that would incarnate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Purgatory kept it in confinement for two centuries: in their unsparing span the dusty score stayed stuffed in a small monastery in Italy, awaiting its admission to the concert stage.
By the time of its delayed emergence jazz had snatched the seat at heaven’s throne. A World War had beset the globe and the pursuit of melody was losing more than steam.
Astor Piazzolla’s 1965-1970 Estaciones Porteñas was one of the few works to honour a feat of the classical era with stubborn tonality. Far from the epoch’s dissonant dissenters, it reflects upon the master’s magnum opus with a roguish reverence: unpeeling notes from pitch bends as it lets loose chatting castanets that mirror crocodiles’ starved snapping teeth.
Interlacing the iconic beacon of Baroque with this much lesser-known experiment is not a violation of Vivaldi: on the contrary it gives the overused, star-crossed composer (once again) his due. Proffering peregrinations of the Buenos Aires seasons, Piazzolla’s passages portray with equal proof the fact that music’s progress doesn’t stall humanity’s dependence on the primal variables of visuals and temperature.
Spiritually compliant with this concept, Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields were several steps short of this summit in Prom 28A at the Royal Albert Hall. Storming both works with ebullient buoyancy, the rapturous ensemble captured jubilant obedience and dismal contemplation but concealed both pieces’ casts of characters.
Naked was the tone of violinist Bell for the most part. Straying from a variable vibrato, his veneer of vigour in the first movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring” (La primavera) and the last of “Summer” (L’estate) was a host of pauses that preceded the most eagerly anticipated entrances, swift oscillations into diminuendo and crescendo and occasional additions of ornate ornamentation. Trills were exquisitely performed in an exhibit of the virtuoso’s limitless capacity that sometimes shed the need to penetrate the pieces on display. Reeling for the lilts of breezes left by winter’s slow departure, Primavera here emerged recalcitrantly radiant. No nuances were seizable amidst its blending splendour.
Following their helmsman, the ensemble opted to embrace a steely tone at times void of vibrato for the greater part of this brief concert. Violas’ strokes of quavers came out character-deprived in Primavera while L’autunno’s pizzicato notes laid claim to just one volume. Strings seemed almost to disperse in differing directions in the third part of L’estate and the dawn of winter in L’inverno came about with choppy tumbles tinkling like collapsed ice.
Showmanship was inexhaustible in Bell’s performances – and sought to undermine much-needed sentiment. Approaching particles of Primavera with a preciousness that came across as overcautious, Bell laid bare dexterity and differing dynamics and the dazzle of an indisputable technique. And yet by pausing sometimes lengthily and ostentatiously, by garnishing his trills with unsolicited accessories and scrapping notes with speedy renderings he offered samples of his gem-like gift: a scarcely scintillating diamond ring in a half-open box.
Extending limber light in its elastic presentations of arpeggios, scales and slumberous dynamics, Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas defied some of the soloist’s signature moves to display a more flexible fiddler. Volume veered deliciously into oblivion in savourable, slow-to-vanish pitch bends of Verano (“Summer”); slender strokes slipped slyly out of earshot in Otoño (“Autumn”) when the violinist played with the bow’s edge.
Apportioning near-perfect rhythms, the small orchestra sustained tenacious temperament throughout the Piazzolla variations… yet elected to stick similar expressions to each one. A solo cello was reluctant to descend into diminuendo in Otoño while the double bass performed a pizzicato brusquely blunt across lugubrious Invierno (“Winter”).
Gershwin’s “Summertime” concluded Bell’s intensely-changing, not especially far-ranging exploration of the switching seasons. Scurrying a little too apace, its notes shunned sensuality in favour of what sounded like an anxious need to reach the beach before its inundation by the crowds. Ornaments were gifted ditties that deserve to be played trinket-free.
Experimentally the concert was successful – showcasing to those unimmersed in The Four Seasons’ multiple descendants its inevitable influence. Performance-wise the hybrid merits a stylistic counterpart; one unafraid to sound Vivaldi’s motley ghosts in Piazzolla’s tribute. With the certainty of our rotating climate, they are there for those who wish to find them.
Prom 28B - another chance to catch this combination - will be broadcast on BBC Four on Friday 27 August.