Max Richter had a score to settle with Vivaldi. Especially with The Four Seasons. He felt the same way as many people who, as children, were attracted to this composition and later despised it. It’s not Vivaldi’s fault, but the elevators, the phone calls, the pipe music… It’s about music that’s so common without often anticipating that it’ll provoke rejection.
Questions of modern life… Unfair but real. “I used to listen to the album at home non-stop when I was a kid. It was one of the few my parents had. You can’t say they were very amateurs, not particularly. I enjoyed it, it was easy for me. It introduced you to a world that I finally belonged to without a hitch, and I owe it a lot for that. It is recognizable, joyful work.”
“Growing up, I hated Vivaldi as an adult. We had a duty to reject it,” explains the German musician
These sounds stayed in the unconscious while Richter made a conscious decision to become a musician. But not in the easy way, but through avant-garde and experimentation. Very attached to the radical side and certain dogmas of the pentagram, he was full of prejudices. Some of them included Vivaldi and his music. “As an adult, I hated it. We had a duty to refuse it,” he admits today, already freed from the corsets that, far from opening his mind to the wild side, bound him. Having regained the primitive and more innocent essence of his taste and musical charms, Richter reconsidered and returned to the baroque score: ‘With that, I wanted to return to the child I was, to sort of search in this music and in this you found it for me.”
Thus the Four Seasons became an obsession for the composer, perhaps trying to atone for the guilt of youthful and haughty rejection. The fact is that immersed in it, Richter has found a way that defines him. Plus, the first time he did it, he was an impressive success. It was 2012 and with his proposal he broke the record for online listeners on the internet. “I don’t know, and I don’t remember the number,” he says. The record company – the Universal group, on whose label Deutsche Grammophon he usually records – registered it: 450 million …
Richter’s music often seems like a work without end, following itself in different variations with the aim of connecting past and future. His albums exude an exquisite coherence that never tires. He has created a sound that can define this era well: between consolation and dystopia, as he did for the soundtrack of The Leftovers or in titles like Sleep or The Blue Notebooks.
Many well-known performers accompanied him during these experiences: from the Chinese pianist Lang Lang to the American violinist Hilary Hahn. For the new performance of “The Four Seasons” he has now turned to Elena Urioste, also a violinist, and to the Chineke! Orchestra, a group consisting mainly of black musicians. The orchestra accepted the challenge of intervening in the baroque without being connoisseurs of the times. They adapted their instruments to special gut strings and chords used in Vivaldi’s time (Venice, 1678-Vienna, 1741). “They didn’t know and worked hard, we all came here to learn, none of us are experts in the field. We wanted to do a sound exploration. In this sense, Elena Urioste’s violin brings freshness, liveliness and youth, while the basis of Chineke! it offers warmth, peace.” In fact, it is the first work they are recording at their new country studio in Oxfordshire. Richter is satisfied: “It brought the result that I expected: an atmosphere and a tactile, sensual, calm feeling,” he says.
The orchestra saw it as a journey into other dimensions. But they return their learning with different and spontaneous live stimuli. Max Richter takes great care in the recordings. He is demanding with the sound he records. Find your own universe. But live he says: “I have no choice but to let myself be carried away by the musicians and to walk along the path, in this case, that Elena and the members of Chineke are marking!”
The orchestra was founded in 2015 by its artistic director Chi Chi Nwanoku, an Irish double bass of Nigerian descent, and has 15 members. His goal: to promote the diversity of interpreters in Europe. The journey to the roots of sound that you have undertaken together with Richter has taken two paths. “In search of baroque origins, but also electronic music. For the first we adapted the instruments of the orchestra and for the second we used synthesizers from the seventies, the famous Minimoog,” assures the composer. “I was amused to explore this parallelism.”
Despite its bravery, its cheerful side, its cheerful character, the baroque also contains a minimalist facet: “In this sense, I wanted the music to speak to us about our time. Vivaldi is a composer who gets carried away by the melody. More sensual than cerebral, unlike Bach, but at the same time as baroque as he is, and that connects him deeply with our time,” says Richter. One was the unrestrained, but also dystopian present. This last element needs to have its counterpoint in the music, and Richter is clear about what it is: “It needs to make us think about the dangers we face, but also make us feel safe and secure , offering us some comfort and at the same time conscience”.
In this regard, the Four Seasons can also be explored from an ecological point of view. Its celebration of nature is exuberant, its emotional connection, the euphoria and melancholy it evokes in us also clings to certain elements: light, water, peace, turbulence… “It inevitably leads us to reconsider the situation. It’s very visual, direct, doesn’t need any filters. Ecology is of course one of the major issues of our time, and we come up with solutions late. We’ve talked a lot between the musicians and myself about how we’d like this work to charge the public’s conscience in that spirit. How can we adapt His message from the past to the urgency of the present?
Vivaldi, he believes, would not have bothered: “In his time nothing was taken for granted and everything was open to interpretation”.
Vivaldi, he believes, would not have bothered. “In his time, nothing was taken for granted and everything was open to interpretation,” he says. In his opinion, the Italian composer is suitable for any open game. But in that sense experimenting with others he admires as well, he would think about it. “Mahler, for example, is so perfect that it’s best not to touch him, he encloses a world of his own. I couldn’t work with Bach to dismantle his mathematics either, his music is intricately intertwined and I would be weird,” he assures.
He regards Mozart as a separate chapter: “The Magic Flute, for example, is a story full of philosophical and ideological symbolism, also a fable, but what connects us to it in the end is a love story. At some points one wonders where this music comes from. I’m neither a believer nor an unbeliever, I’m open to everything in that sense, but Mozart’s music sometimes enters the realm of the inexplicable. If we speak in those terms of faith, to me Mozart is God and maybe Wagner is the devil.” Without scorning the benefits, the virtues also come from the light or the dark that the two have brought to music.
The new four seasons. Vivaldi recomposed
Elena Urioste and Chineke! orchestra
Deutsche Grammophon, 2022
Follow BABELIA on Facebook and Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
reduced by 50 percent
Subscribe to continue reading
read limitless