This year, Gordon’s idea of fun involves not only music, but also pictures, colored lighting, spoken narrative, and a dash of playful stage business. For two performances of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which Gordon calls “statistically the most recorded composition in history,” the festival will heighten the listening experience with projected paintings and stage lighting keyed to the program of the movements: a harsh orange light of the sun for “Summer,” something thinner and blue-toned for “Winter.”
As for the paintings, Gordon is tapping the composer’s Venetian contemporary Sebastiano Ricci, who actually may have inspired Vivaldi’s famous four-panel concerto. Instead of simply projecting full-frame images by Ricci and others of the period, a strategy that risks literalizing the score, Gordon plans a more impressionistic approach. Twelve scenes, of trees, sky water, shepherds, and so on — one for each section of The Four Seasons — will appear in partial, semiabstract, vague, or slightly blurred treatments on a five-by-10-foot screen at the Sunset Center Theater. Muslin drapes will add a further softening touch.
“The idea here is not to draw attention to how trendy and geeky we are, but to enhance the music’s affect and heighten our sensory awareness of it,” notes Gordon, who began his 21-year tenure at the festival as a tenor soloist. By employing the “basic principles of classical rhetoric — to entertain and engage the heart and thereby open opportunities for learning and insight” — Gordon believes this fresh approach to Vivaldi will remain true to the festival’s core mission.
This kind of experiment is a Carmel first. Details of how all the elements will come together are still being worked out. Gordon and Music Director Bruno Weil considered something similar a few years ago, when the idea of combining Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with Albrecht Dürer etchings was proposed. But the match felt too specific and confining. The mixed-media scheme was scuttled until the right piece came along.
Festival regulars may feel more at home when it comes to “Haydn Seek: An Aha! Concert” scheduled for July 21 and 28. In a format first used in Carmel four years ago and repeated every year since, the “Aha!” programs merge spoken commentary and, recently, some visuals with the music. “It’s not a lecture concert,” Gordon hastens to explain. “We’re not telling the life of the composer or building some kind of argument. It’s a potpourri concert with a narrative thread.”
Built around movements from various symphonies, a piano trio, The Seasons, Mass in Time of War, and more, this year’s “Aha!” will touch on everything from Haydn’s superstar career in London to his depressions and his reputation as a ladies’ man. Don’t expect to have any gentle Papa Haydn predispositions confirmed. “People may experience a Haydn who is more exciting, more innovative, and more original than they think,” says Gordon, who will serve as onstage narrator.
No picture of Haydn would be complete without a nod to his humor. In what’s billed as a “reenactment” of the “Farewell” Symphony (No. 45, in F-sharp minor), the musicians will get into the act by getting offstage.