THE 8 SEASONS is the joint interpretation of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the Estaciones Porteñas by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is his most famous work and one of the best known works in the history of classical music. The four concertos that compose it, “The Spring”, “The Summer”, “The Autumn” and “The Winter”, are part of a set of 12 concertos for violin and orchestra premiered in Amsterdam in 1725. Vivaldi tried to capture in this work the feelings that the scenes of nature and rural life aroused in him, throughout the seasons of the year.
The Estaciones Porteñas were composed by the Argentine bandoneonist and composer Astor Piazzolla independently between 1964 and 1970. In this work he combines tango, Argentine popular music par excellence, with classical music in a masterful way. The music was originally composed for quintet (bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass), but was rewritten by the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov between 1996 and 1998 for solo violin and string orchestra.
This version, which intersperses the seasons of each composer, with Vivaldi’s “La Primavera” opening the concert and Piazzolla’s “Primavera Porteña” closing it, is the one we will hear today by La Casanovas Orchestra, formed by great soloists and professional musicians who come together in a very high level formation. In this way the contrast between the vitality and energy of Italian baroque and the deep melancholy and longing of Argentine tango is even more evident, in an extremely suggestive combination.
