Max Richter's music takes the stage

Adroit and savvy, Antonio Vivaldi navigated the toxic musical politics of early 18th-century Venice for decades without serious incident. Hired and fired several times from the faculty of an orphanage for musically talented young women, this high-living redhead was both a mediocre priest and a staggeringly productive composer who amassed an opulent catalog of works ranging from masses to operas to hundreds of concertos. But his survival instincts were bolstered by copious amounts of luck, and in the later 1730s that luck started running out. A catastrophic decision to relocate to Vienna in 1740 resulted in grinding poverty, illness, and death a year later from an unspecified “internal infection.” 

Antonio Vivaldi’s memory and his music passed swiftly into obscurity, not to be rehabilitated until the 20th century. A set of four violin concertos, each portraying one of the seasons, was the key to his renaissance, in one of the most spectacular posthumous second acts in music history. The Four Seasons probably dates from Vivaldi’s years as the music director for the court of Mantua, during one of his periodic absences from Venice. Filled with luminous nature painting, inventive solo -violin writing, and a bevy of enchanting melodies, The Four Seasons has well earned its modern hit-parade popularity. It has been played and recorded by everybody everywhere. It has been re-arranged, transcribed, excerpted, adapted, and co-opted. 

And it has been reimagined by composer-pianist Max Richter, a genre-bending creator who incorporated passages from Vivaldi’s original concertos into an altogether new work that weaves subtle electronics into its contemporary orchestral sound. “I wanted to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence re-write it, re-composing it in a literal way,” he explains. Along the way he has discarded about 75% of Vivaldi’s original. “At every point I had to work out how much is Vivaldi and how much is me.” 

The original recorded version of Richter’s recomposition adds a prelude-like opener titled “Spring 0” that introduces the Vivaldi-Richter sound world with a shimmer of looped patterns that lead without break to the first of the three “Spring” concerto movements. “Spring 2” is particularly remarkable given the solo violin’s sustained lyrical line, followed by the sprightly figurations of “Spring 3” that complement a continuation of the violin’s heartfelt melody. 

Summers in Mantua can get seriously hot, and Vivaldi’s second concerto captured the somnolence of a population nearly immobilized in the heat. Richter honors the original’s mood in the three “Summer” movements, including the iconic solo -violin cuckoo bird that injects a flurry of activity into the overall portrayal of sun-washed torpor. But there’s little in Vivaldi that can match the exquisite dying fall of “Summer 2” with its mournful intertwined violin-viola duet over rhythmic patterns in the orchestra. Richter’s thunderstorm in “Summer 3” originates in Vivaldi but also makes brilliant use of loops and repetitive figures to enhance all that windy bluster and flashes of lightning.  

Most listeners will recognize the chipper tune that opens “Autumn.” But we aren’t likely to anticipate the rhythmic jags that Richter imparts to Vivaldi’s foursquare original, nor the solo violin’s wonderful flights of fancy, nor the introverted and wistful second half of the movement. The wiry sound of a harpsichord takes center stage in “Autumn 2” as part of a downright spooky atmosphere, followed by the tally-ho hunting energy of the third movement, inspired by Vivaldi’s original but resolutely 21st century with its electronically-enhanced chords in the strings and distinctly urban rhythms. 

The winter chill sets in and the days grow short. Richter has incorporated Vivaldi’s deliberately squeaky string effects for “Winter 1,”, together with orchestral flurries that suggest icicles and freezing winds. That’s followed by one of the work’s most striking movements, an eloquent invocation of silvery landscapes in the orchestra that supports a decidedly folk-like melody in the solo violin. A gentle pitter-patter in the strings at the start of “Winter 3” suggests that perhaps winter is giving way to the first intimations of the spring thaw, enhanced by soft patterns in the string soloists. 

Richter has said that writing this work was “difficult but also rewarding because the raw material is so fascinating.” Violinist Daniel Hope, the soloist in the premiere as well as the first recording, added that Richter has "put Vivaldi’s original piece through a time machine and brought it into the 21st century.”

On January 28, 1936, an anonymous editorial appeared in Soviet state-owned newspaper Pravda under the ominous title of “Muddle Instead of Music.” A horrifying diatribe against musical modernism—much of it in response to Dmitri Shostakovich’s racy opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District—it included a truly ominous phrase: “This game can only end badly.” 

It is possible that Joseph Stalin himself wrote the article, and it is nearly certain that he supervised its composition, but whatever the original source, “Muddle” stands as one of the most terrifying threats in the history of Western music. Even if the composer most directly impacted was Shostakovich, the article’s icy thrust reached far. Numerous Soviet writers, directors, choreographers, and composers shivered in its arctic blast, fearing retribution from the state. Among those was Adrian Piotrovsky, the original writer of the synopsis for Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Although Prokofiev had completed his first version of the score as early as September 1935, controversies and staffing overhauls at the Bolshoi Ballet, followed by “Muddle,” meant that the first performance of the complete ballet had to wait until 1940—but even then, the choreographer made massive changes to Prokofiev’s score. 

It’s hard to think of Romeo and Juliet as ever having been controversial; nowadays it seems a natural companion to the beloved Tchaikovsky ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty. Like those Tchaikovsky evergreens, Romeo and Juliet has enjoyed a second life in orchestral excerpts, either freely drawn from the score or from Prokofiev’s own three suites, not to mention his Op. 75 set for solo piano. (The earliest recording dates from 1938 with Prokofiev himself conducting the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in the second suite.) 

Prokofiev may have been the enfant terrible of Russian-then-Soviet music in his early days, but by the 1930s he had mellowed considerably, allowing the compassionate and lyrical side of his compositional nature to shine through. He was still more than capable of blowing the roof off the hall with orchestral and pianistic pyrotechnics, but in Romeo and Juliet he displays a tenderness that might surprise those expecting nonstop bombast. In fact, this is one of the most passionate and romantic scores in all ballet, permeated with a palpable love for its characters. (Trivia: Prokofiev’s original version trifled with Shakespeare and actually gave the lovers a happy ending, his rationale being that it’s a ballet and dead people can’t dance. The public uproar that ensued was so furious that Prokofiev backed off. In his revision Romeo and Juliet die as Shakespeare intended them to, rather than dance off into the sunset.)

David Danzmayr’s selections from Prokofiev’s three suites closely follow Shakespeare’s play, so the listener should have no difficulty following along the timeless tale— the street brawl, the Capulets’ ball where Romeo first meets Juliet, the balcony scene, Friar Lawrence, Tybalt and Mercutio’s duel, and the tragic concluding tomb scene.

He was a chic celebrity, a bellwether of contemporary American life, and his patrician features and cultivated New England voice were familiar to millions from his many appearances on radio and television. And yet Leonard Bernstein was something of a throwback to an earlier age when to be a musician meant to encompass the whole of the art rather than to segregate oneself into a well-defined specialty. Like those multitudinous kapellmeisters who peppered Europe from the 17th through 19th centuries, Bernstein could do everything. And he could do it all well: composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, writer. 

Bernstein’s theatrical masterpiece West Side Story, with lyrics by a then-unknown Stephen Sondheim and book by Arthur Laurents, opened to solid, if not overwhelming, success at New York’s Winter Garden Theater on September 26, 1957. A dramatic departure from Broadway norms in its threading of Jerome Robbins' deeply integrated dance routines throughout an urban update of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story constitutes a sophisticated hybrid of musical and ballet, the whole empowered by Bernstein’s magnificent, and now iconic, score. 

In 1961, four years after the Broadway premiere, Bernstein assembled an orchestral suite that follows the show’s plot mostly via its dance routines, including songs such as “Somewhere,” and later fused with “I Have a Love” in the tragic Finale. A point of particular interest: Bernstein’s skillful variants of the ecstatic love song “Maria” in both the “Cha-Cha” and the “Meeting Scene” as Tony and Maria discover each other, followed by an up-tempo variation of the same melodic figure as the nervous Jets dance the “Cool” fugue immediately before their climactic rumble with the Sharks.