Singing and Chiming. Ancient and Baroque Sounds

Artists

Europa Galante
Fabio Biondi, violin and conductor

Program

The Four Seasons

Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762)

Concerto grosso No. 12 in D minor “La Follia” (publ. 1729)

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Concerto No. 1 in E major “La primavera”, Op. 8 RV 269 (1723)

Concerto No. 2 in G minor “L’estate”, Op. 8 RV 315 (1723)

Concerto No. 3 in F major “L’autunno”, Op. 8 RV 293 (1723)

Concerto No. 4 in F minor “L’inverno”, Op. 8 RV 297 (1723)

Concert with no interval

With the collaboration of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Madrid

The Seasons

Few baroque performers have reflected as many times on a piece as Fabio Biondi has done with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. His first recording, which has already turned 30, broke many schemes and today has become justly mythical, and the Italian violinist has continued to delve into a music that he knows like very few others. The Four Seasons are nothing more than four violin concertos that circulated as manuscripts around Europe years before Vivaldi published them in Amsterdam in 1725 as the first of his opus 8. At that time, they drew attention for their programmatic content, something not very common in the Italian music of the time. Biondi contextualizes them with the Follia by Geminiani, an arrangement in the form of a concerto grosso that this composer made in England on the last sonata of Corelli’s op. V, indeed the music collection that was most times reissued throughout the 18th century.