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‘Yes, “another” recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons!’ cries Le Concert de la Loge’s violinist director Julien Chauvin at the top of his programme note for this latest addition to the toppling pile – thus beating me to it, because tercentenary year for the work or not, any artist itching to record this most ubiquitous of works does need to sit themselves down and seriously ask what, beyond personal legacy, they can usefully offer the world by doing so. Chauvin’s own reasoning is the number of times he and his ensemble have now performed it (which sounds suspiciously like ‘legacy’ to me), and a recent encounter with Mourad Merzouki’s dancers, which he says has resulted in he and the ensemble becoming more dancingly fleet-footed and attuned to one another than ever before. My own answer for their finished offering (the ensemble appearing, by the way, in a chamber-weight, one-to-apart constellation) would be the presence of one of the two further Vivaldi works they include: the ravishing aria ‘Sovvente il sole’ from the serenata Andromeda liberata, for which they’re joined by countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian. Featuring a prominent violin part duetting with the voice, this has been recorded many times, but here it’s performed in its original key of E minor, bringing ringing open violin strings into the equation. The specific open strings here are of a Gagliano violin specially lent to Chauvin by the Château de Versailles, and reader, the resultant performance is to die for – luminously radiant, with Chauvin’s bright sweetness on the Gagliano a delectable foil for Bénos-Djian’s bright purity and lucid accompanying textures, and the sheer sexiness of its insouciantly sensuous, gliding flow.
As for the actual Four Seasons, while Chauvin asserts that they haven’t gone for extremes, exaggerated dynamics or ‘originality at all costs’, to my ears it does sound on the upper end of the esoteric scale. I’m struggling to think of where else I’ve heard such clipped articulation – in Autumn’s final Allegro hunt, the violins’ top notes in bars 9-12 are pinprick peeps, for instance – or such aggressively forte off-tune viola dog barks in Spring’s Largo. Then among the lickety-split tempos: Winter’s central movement is pacy enough as to arguably no longer be a Largo, although its radiant energy and the legato flow from Chauvin and viola player Pierre-Éric Nimylowycz against the bouncing pizzicato raindrops are fantastic in their own right. Such qualities combine to electric effect also in the Summer storm, where the virtuosically handled speed and sense of abandon evoke the lashing elements with a rare and genuinely exciting vividness. Overall, though, this feels more like one working best as a refreshing live performance, rather than for repeated listening on disc.
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