Vivaldi: The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four concerti grossi by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives musical expression to a season of the year. They were written around 1716-1717 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional concerti grossi, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Though three of the concerti are wholly original, the first, "Spring", borrows motifs from a Sinfonia in the first act of Vivaldi's contemporaneous opera Il Giustino. The inspiration for the concertos is not the countryside around Mantua, as initially supposed, where Vivaldi was living at the time, since according to Karl Heller. they could have been written as early as 1716-1717, while Vivaldi was engaged with the court of Mantua only in 1718. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them Vivaldi represented flowing creeks, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), a shepherd and his barking dog, buzzing flies, storms, drunken dancers, hunting parties from both the hunters' and the prey's point of view, frozen landscapes, and warm winter fires.

Unusually for the period, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying sonnets (possibly written by the composer himself) that elucidated what it was in the spirit of each season that his music was intended to evoke. The concerti therefore stand as one of the earliest and most detailed examples of what would come to be called program music—i.e., music with a narrative element. Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. For example, in the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be heard in the viola section. The music is elsewhere similarly evocative of other natural sounds. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements (fast–slow–fast), and, likewise, each linked sonnet into three sections.

是巴洛克乐派划时代的杰作，它以写实的手法来描绘情景，《四季》比较名的版本有：马里纳/圣马丁乐团和勒佛戴的ARGO版、Philips阿卡多的“四把名琴版”等；当然也有象穆特、甘乃迪和吉东 克莱玛那样独特和另类的演绎；甚至还有人将它改成爵士乐，如Telarc的那张《爵士四季》等。毫无疑问这张CD是首选

四季的演奏版本繁多，这个是我最喜爱的版本之一。还记得是在上世纪九十年代初，我在中图进出口总公司大厦购得这张CD，当时价格143元。至今还用来播放。