Grace Notes

INTERVIEW
Filippo Ciabatti on Vivaldi

DONNA REILLY

DR: We’re all looking forward to the Vivaldi concert in January, especially The Four Seasons, which is every Vivaldi fan’s favorite. Can you give us a little background on it?

The Four Seasons is actually a four-concerti collection, which is part of a larger collection of twelve—all published in Amsterdam in 1725. And, as we all know, the four are named after the seasons of the year. Each is written as a concerto for solo violin in dialogue with the orchestra—a true Italian concerto grosso. What’s special about these concerti is that Vivaldi wrote a sonnet to accompany each of them and these sonnets are noted in the music score. For instance, the chirping of a bird is noted quite specifically in the violin part, and the same is true for the hunt, or the sounds of ice in winter, and so on. So this is what makes it unique. It’s probably one of the first examples of Program Music—music that reflects a written text.

And the beautiful violin part will be played by UVB’s concertmaster Susanna Ogata?

Yes, she’ll actually be playing four, very challenging violin concerti.

We’re going to be doing much more Vivaldi on this program.

Yes, the first part of the program will feature another beloved UVB artist, Nola Richardson, performing a selection of Vivaldi’s works for soprano and strings. I want to give our audience an understanding of the broadly different kinds of music that Vivaldi wrote. He wrote hundreds of things from concerti and sacred music to opera. So we will be offering a sampling of these in our program. We’ll be doing one of the secular cantatas that he wrote for solo voice and strings, one of the sacred cantatas, and one of his opera arias—something we don’t hear a lot of! We’ll open the concert with a short, kind of famous, instrumental piece called Concerto alla Rustica.

Any final words for our audiences?

You know, I think it will be interesting for everyone to hear music that is so popular today played on the instruments that were in use during the time it was composed. Period instruments have a different, very interesting range of sonority than their modern equivalents. You haven’t really heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons until you’ve heard it played on a Baroque violin!