Young, brash, refreshing --- and accomplshed
Jesse Kornbluth | New York | 04/16/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Is there a more frequently recorded piece of classical music than Vivaldi's Four Seasons? And talk about over-played --- I don't know if they still do this, but the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills used to pipe this music in to the reception area with such great commitment that I don't recall ever not hearing it. So why should we care if someone has added yet another recording of the Vivaldi chestnut to the pile?
Because, if you're like me, you've avoided this piece almost as diligently as you've avoided, say, the Pachelbel Canon. And if you've got to get reacquainted with this piece, why not hear it played by a young violinist who's got the brash sensibility of an impatient talent with a fresh approach?
Lara St. John may be an Internet sensation --- her Bach Concerto Album topped the iTunes Classical category and her recording of Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo was the best-selling double album on iTunes in 2007 --- but she eluded me until recently. That's hard to imagine, for, if nothing else, she's great at self-promotion. Consider:
-- On her debut CD, she posed nude, holding a violin across her chest. "I see no reason to hide who I am or what I look like," she said.
-- She plays a 1779 Guadagnini violin, valued at $1 million, "on loan from an anonymous donor".
-- She doesn't downplay the importance of emotion --- well, emotion on steroids --- in her playing. "What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?" she says.
All this would be off-putting if she were just a beauty with adequate technique. But the thing is, Lara St. John really is a virtuoso. Born in Canada, she began playing the violin at two years old. She first performed in concert at four and in Europe at 10. She's ambitious and fearless.
And clever. Her recording of The Four Seasons by Vivaldi is followed by a version written by Astor Piazzolla, the great tango master. It's a novel bookend --- and musically valid.
Be warning: If you let "The Four Seasons" into your head again, it may lodge there. Especially if you listen to Lara St. John's animated --- okay: passionate --- recording."
A brilliant interpretation in superb sound, but not for puri
Bruce Zeisel | Albany, NY United States | 12/01/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This one will grab your attention! Some will find the innovative interpretation unacceptable, but for me it is an edifying and thoroughly satisfying account of the famous Four Seasons with a bonus, "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires" by Piazolla arranged for solo violin by Desyatnikov, whose Russian Seasons, Gidon Kremer recorded for Naxos several years ago.
St. John does unexpected things with the Vivaldi. The recording at least makes the orchestra appear larger at times than what the lavish booklet indicates is the "continuo" group. Maybe that is a hint! There is a lush quality to some of the string playing that bespeaks a large body of strings, but these occur only infrequently at strategic points in each movement. Similarly there is a power in the bass that sometimes startles, where bass viols double with harpsichord.
But I say this is not for "faint of heart, not for PIP purists, or purists of any sort, because St. John employs "pitch bending" at some very strategic locations. For me the effect was startling, then magical. Purists will quail at such devices I am sure. I loved it! This adds much to the descriptive or programmatic quality of the music.
Also notable is St. Johns frequent and extended absence of vibrato, with some notes beginning absent vibrato, but ending with it. Others are simply played absent vibrato. There is in some passages, again strategically chosen for effect, a marked portamento, with extraordinary ornamentation.
This is not what you normally expect when you put on a recording of the Four Seasons, or go to hear it in the concert hall. Season before last, I heard Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields play this music in the Troy Music Hall.
Normally I would always favor a live performance over a recording but THIS recording was infinitely more stimulating, more interesting. Lara St. John is an artist with a very original and creative voice. Though she is not afraid to defy convention to get her artistic views across, her phrasing is exquisite throughout the entire work. Vivaldi's music has never been so descriptive! I applaud her heartily for what she has done here. This is Vivaldi for the 21st Century!
The Piazolla is entertaining if not "great" music. I enjoyed it enormously. It is an excellent companion piece to the Vivaldi.
The sound in multi-channel, doesn't have the absolutely butter smooth quality of some PentaTones or Channel Classics. But it gets the music across and that is what matters.
This is a really fine production that I can't recommend heartily enough"
Lara St. John, SimonBYSO: Vivaldi 4 Seasons, Piazolla 4 Seas
Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 08/27/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Okay, blame my title on the hip-hop affected nieces and nephews who are always trying to get that old guy to update. A more sedate summary? Well - Fresh, Frisky, Finessed, and Feeling Fine?
Fact is, we have no dearth of very well played Vivaldi Four Seasons concertos in our current catalog. You could pick your favorite violin soloist in the effective era of recorded arts, past or present; then you could probably find his or her recording. Add in the softer margins of the resale business, and indeed we do have plentiful choices. Yet another?
Well. Let me be slow to say this: Yes.
I'm kidding, right? Well. No.
The Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony Orchestra is the star ensemble of what Venezuelans simply tag, El Sistema. The System. It was devised nearly single-handedly by Veneuela's maestro Economist, Jose Antonio Abreu. This amazing feat of South American creativity helps lift innumerable Venezuelan youth out of poverty and violence, by getting them to learn how to play music. A crazy idea to most of the western world, and probably not the first thing that comes to mind for any global economist pondering his or her next academic publication? To say the least.
Yet it works. As the star ensemble, the SBYSO really now constitutes one of the great orchestras of the Spanish speaking planet. At first this band was welcome, almost as a recognition of impossibly good deeds done. Lifting children out of the dangerous mix of drug cartels and poverty and violence. All that. Yet, a few discs have been published now, and so we come to the popular heart beat of the classical catalog, Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
Piazolla's smaller-sized musical suite, Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, fills out the disc. And all is captured in detailed, vivid, multiple channel surround sound, high resolution super audio. (Are we now hoping the SACD format will survive, with the recent introduction of BlueRay high resolution audio?)
The disc booklet says that our venue is the Sala Simon Boliver, Centro de Accion Social por La Music in Caracas, Venezuela. It gathers the sound of the players very nicely, and cradles the reading in just the right amount of hall resonance without losing the finesse and the detail of the instruments involved, especially again those youth player strings.
Kudos to veteran recording producer, Martha De Francisco. She used to work for Phillips Classics, (Polygram, Universal Classics), now transmogrified into an independent outfit called Pentatone. She teaches recording arts and sciences at Canada's McGill University. From the solid gold achievement on this disc, she's the real deal. Lucky recording arts students.
The band has been reduced to chamber proportions. Six first and second violins. Four violas and cellos. Two basses. And ensemble member Bruno Procopio on harpsichord.
The headlong forward motion of the faster sections will not necessarily surprise any listener who has already heard the third or fourth generations of period instrument readings. Bands like Il Giardino Armonico have already laid down explosive musical markers for taking a less than somnolent approach to these famous string concertos. And other groups like Sejon have already showed how that vigor transfers to modern strings. Lara St. John and the band stand bright in this lineage. This isn't your grandfather's slow, heavy cycle, beautifully played by a big band leader with a famous violinist on solo fiddle, as may have been.
As with other discs, a listener's thumbs up or down may turn on the fiddle soloist. Here we have Lara St. John. She's just who she is. Sorta young, sorta maverick, but a real deal player nonetheless. If I had to pigeon-hole her current style, God forbid, I'd probably say that she sometimes comes across like a young Nigel Kennedy - wanting to get western classical music out of its social and economic boxes without undoing the brilliance and beauty and bounty of the music as fine art.
It helps that Ms. St. John is playing a good fiddle. She has loaned use of a sterling, 1779 Guadagnini, nicknamed 'Salabue". She aims to join the great host of solo players who have taken these four concertos to heart. She knows her instrument, and immerses herself in the music, and digs into things with great color, gusto, and point. Her playing is individualized, and that may put traditionalists off; though I dare anybody to stand too hard and fast in saying that this familiar music cannot sustain her approach.
Writing this, I noted that the existing reviewers are split, high to low. One is praising, one giving this disc the lowest marks possible, disappointed. I'm up there with the praise.
Also newly released, Gidon Kremer and Camerata Baltica are strongly praised by nearly every reviewer. I don't doubt their excellence; but for me, their disc falls down on the sequencing, with a concerto Vivaldi intermixed with successive Piazolla. Truth is, I'm not all that convinced that Vivaldi and Piazolla belong together, despite their shared references to the four seasons theme. And despite Piazolla actually quoting Vivaldi at the close of his work. If I'm going to have them together on the same disc, I think I greatly prefer having each piece of music, intact, as itself.
Eight other super audio versions of these concertos are available, and so far as I know, no disc has poor sound or markedly poor playing. Soloists range - from traditionalists like Joseph Silverstein (Telarc, DSD Soundstream), Isaac Stern (Sony), Massimo Quarta (Delos); to strong period instrumentalists like Dan Laurin (BIS), Christina Day Martinson (Boston Baroque, Telarc), Stefano Montanari (Byzantine Academy, Arts Music). Janine Jansen is my most recent high pick from the super audio bunch; though I do have a couple of others, too. I do love Jansen's heightened polish and sophistication, a likely polar opposite from the gusty, risk-taking immersion that you will hear on this disc from St. John and the Venezuelans. In red book mastering, I've long cherished Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi, if you can still find it.
The Piazolla comes across to me, still, as a dance-inspired work. The music does as good a job as any of Piazolla's other pieces, lifting Tango into higher realms. The Buenos Aires Four Seasons are altogether hotter, breezier, and less cloistered than the Vivaldi concertos. We are in the street, at the cafe, in the open air green parks, sitting by the rivers, going to clubs, hanging out. The hip-hop slam and slouch serves Piazolla deeply and well in these readings. While you have plenty of choices in the Vivaldi, this reading may likely end up a preferred version of the Piazolla, interpretation stars plus sound stars.
Our Conductor of Record is Arturo Marturet, and despite being older and arguably, more venerable in classical music circles; he manages to keep up with the young folks, and then some. He's much appreciated for not having to damp down such youthful spirits.
So that's it, Interpretation Stars, Sound Stars - all for this lively, gutsy, risk-taking reading."
Track Listings (16) - Disc #1![Vivaldi: The Four Seasons; Piazzolla: The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires [Hybrid SACD]](https://nationalbookswap.com/cd//l/17/5117/6185117.jpg)