Vivaldi - The Four Seasons by Janine Jansen

There are few classical music pieces which are widely identified by almost any person in the world. Possibly they are not able to point out the name of the piece or the composer of it, but certainly they can say that they've heard it somewhere. Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons certainly is one of them: A classical piece which has become a true standard. Well, the standards are great, but there are also downsides with them. Imagine some classic rock "standard", like Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. I bet you have heard it several times but.... there's only one way to play it right (and actually one band to play it right). If someone even thinks of playing it differently, that's the musician's first step towards Dante's Hell. The Four Seasons has this status. It is composed to a full-size orchestra, so a full-sized string orchestra is the only way to play it right. Naturally, the other ways are wrong.

Vivaldi released his Four Seasons on 1750. Actually, Vivaldi named the four first Opus 8 violin concertos as Le Quattro Stagioni. The concertos itself have a nature which is common to all Vivaldi's concertos. Each piece has three parts: fast - slow and ending to a fast part. The first performance of The Four Seasons took place in Amsterdam. It became an instant success across Europe! However, the modern date success of The Four Seasons emerged as late as 1950's, when the first recordings of it were released.

After 250 years of the first performance of The Four Seasons, it has become one of the most recorded classical music pieces in the world. Now the young Dutch violinist, Janine Jansen has released a new version of The Four Seasons. Unlike the previous recordings, ms Jansen has got a different approach. No... she has not made a fusion jazz version of Vivaldi's masterpiece. There's still a string orchestra.

Now, here's the difference: Vivaldi's Four Seasons is usually performed with a full-sized string orchestra. However, in this recording there's only eight musicians on stage. One might thing that this kind of set-up is a down-scaled version of Vivaldi's masterpiece, but it is not. After the first listening session I had written the following notes to my papers: fresh, new, coarse, innovative, exiting... The bottom line is clear: Janine Jansen really has found a new approach in performing The Four Seasons. For me there were two issues which were obvious: the performance made me feel like the Four Seasons would have got its first premiere, secondly it sounded more natural than any of the other Four Seasons recordings.

Jansen has a very unique playing technique and skills. The Four Season is not the easiest piece for a violinist. It either works or it does not work. In this cas it really works. In the hands of ms Jansen, Vivaldi's music just flows through the air. The performance is not as sterile as most of The Four Seasons recordings - it has a lot coarse elements in the sound, but it rocks as a moose. For me it sounded like this recording could be an unplugged version of any previous recordings.

The recording has been done in Amsterdam - the same city where The Four Seasons was performed for the first time. The recording venue was Beurs van Berlage Concert & Congreszalen. This multichannel recording has been engineered close to a perfect. The orchestra fit nicely between the front channels, but the sound stage is crystal clear, wide and open. I felt like my listening room size was doubled! It was virtually difficult to point out any music from the surround channels - but after I shut them down, I was able to notice them. This is extremely well recorded album. Once again - Decca boys and girls have done good work.

Here's my recommendations for the album:
- Listen it on a bright spring day
- Take some of your friens with you
- Served with young, dry white win (naturally from Italy, like: La Luciana Gavi, Cortese 2006)

And by the way... if you find this review useful... please tick yourself as a reader of this blog. It is nice to write these blogs - especially when you know that someone reads them!

Welcome to Fivedotone

My hobby is listening to music. It is totally useless hobby. Just sitting in the sweet spot and trying to capture the nuances, feelings and emotions. What makes it worse I have become more addicted with multichannel music. It is the format when most of the audiophiles cross their hands and call for an exorcist. Shall there be only two channels - no more - no less.

However, multichannel recordings have been available for about ten years now. That's a pretty long time. One would expect that record companies in general would have learned to make good multichannel recordings. But not. Unfortunately most of the multichannel recordings are bad. It is not about the musicians, but what happens in the recording studios. The whole listening experience is often ruined with unnatural usage of the surround channels. I can understand that it takes time for audio engineers to learn how to make good multichannel recordings. But I do not understand why ten years is not enough to learn that.

Fortunately there's some light in the tunnel. There's also exceptional multichannel recordings. I have found some SACD and DVD-A recordings as very enjoyable. This is what the Fivedotone is all about: enjoyable multichannel recordings. Just the music. No video. I hope that my blog helps other audiophiles to capture my own recommendations of good multichannel music.

Fivedotone addresses openly all the music genres, but classical music definitely has a lot of room in here. The first recording which I'm going to address is Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons by Janine Jansen. I've played the album several times now. I shall publish my more detailed comments about it in the near future.

Happy listening.
- Petri