Few masterworks are less in need of an anniversary celebration than Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Marking the 300th year since the work’s first publication in Amsterdam seems redundant given how present it is in our lives.
But with the true heart of a purist, violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, backed by French early-music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, asked the audience on Wednesday, March 19, at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall to forget hearing the concertos in endless commercials, elevators, lobbies, and waiting rooms and just concentrate on the inspired music.
And then he and the group delivered on that wish with a performance that nearly took the roof off the theater.
It was one of those concerts where you leave the hall inspired, with a spring in your step, as well as better informed. The program de Swarte curated (which the ensemble would reprise on Sunday, March 23, at Orange County’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts) contextualized Vivaldi’s concertos with a broader look at the swaggering, intensely theatrical Venetian style — its roots and 17th-century development and its particular habits.
The concert was stacked with music, a lot of it by Vivaldi, but gave the lie to the sad stereotype that the composer wrote the same concerto 500 times. Maybe you had to be a bit of an early-music fanatic to enjoy the ride, but the large hall was filled with folks who vociferously applauded everything.
The program was organized roughly chronologically, beginning with a transcription of Claudio Monteverdi’s Adoramus te, SV 289, written for the Basilica San Marco. Vivaldi’s early composition training from Giovanni Legrenzi, Monteverdi’s successor at San Marco, would have included the Venetian church style.
But the virtuoso 17th-century violinist Marco Uccellini was an even more decisive influence on Vivaldi because of the former’s impact on the development of instrumental music, violin writing in particular. The concert paired his improvisatory variations on a popular dance tune, Aria sopra la bergamasca (1642), with a Vivaldi work, the Concerto “Madrigalesco” for strings, RV 129 (ca. 1720), that begins with a daring and colorful harmonic sequence and continues in a clearly vocal style that you wouldn’t immediately identify with a violin virtuoso and which references an older musical genre known for its harmonic adventurousness.
The program was designed to have a work by Vivaldi’s contemporary, Francesco Geminiani — his transcription of Arcangelo Corelli’s variations on the dance La Follia (from Concerto Grosso No. 12 [1729]) — but de Swarte cut it to save time, only to restore it as an encore.
And then there were the four concertos everyone was waiting for. Like everything Les Arts Florissants played, these pieces were done with a unanimity of purpose and cohesiveness that was virtuosic in itself, given how many tempo changes de Swarte led the ensemble through as he soloed. His conception of these pieces is grounded in the broader Venetian style, certainly, but he also brings out the interplay of styles and the dramatic contrasts within the concertos more daringly than most performances I’ve heard.
These contrasts occurred on every level. The tempos didn’t just change — they accelerated and decelerated to a startling degree. The end of the first movement of “Spring,” which depicts the dying away of the brief thunderstorm before the birds sing again, faded to a whisper of a pianissimo at a much slower tempo. Contrasts in bowing and timbre, and dynamic interplay between de Swarte and the ensemble, completed the picture.
As a soloist, de Swarte plays brilliantly and cleanly, of course, but his finest quality is his legato, maintained with laser focus even through the most athletic passagework. There’s hardly a touch of routine in his playing; everything seems newly discovered.
And there’s more Vivaldi to discover, as de Swarte proved when the ensemble took up an unfinished movement from the Concerto in B-flat Major, RV 370, which the soloist himself found and completed. It put the final exclamation point on an exhilarating concert.
