Above : SSO players give a rendition of a changed Four Seasons in front of new projected imagery and programmatic poetry thst accompanied the original work.
Familiarity is a comfort for us all, in any environment. Knowing what to expect each day, week, month and season gives pleasant relief. Music lovers listening to favourite works also experience significant calm, joy and positive neurological reactions each time they follow the trajectory of a well-known and loved work.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the popoular work linking humans to the weather and discussed by violin soloist and string orchestra would easily be considered one such favourite across the globe.
Many Sydney Festival ticket holders would have been keen to experience the usual happy rush in hearing SSO and concertmaster Andrew Haveron tackle the popular work’s typical tension and release with video at the Barangaroo Headland.
However this was not to be the comfort zone for this innovative festival event. In an environment created to resemble the entropy of uncertain weather patterns from climate change history, Vivaldi’s full work was presented with great distortion.
This performance was part of a global creative plan to unsettle the public, politicians and informed audiences through digital destruction of the usual Four Seasons sounds and through music and imagery bring more awareness to the issue of climate change.
Consultant composer Hugh Crosthwaite assisted in the process of electronically combining climate change data with the original score to create a distorted, computer generated and locally identifying new score for SSO to present.
This event supplied a full version of Vivaldi’s work but it was tweaked to apocalyptic proportion . Tonalities were fractured, gestures inverted and movements taking on also horror filmic soundtrack character to mock the joy and low level disasters of weather patterns in the programmatic poetry projected onto the stage.
Above: The SSO with violinist Andrew Havoren
It was a joy to witness SSO back on our stages after a long pandemic absence from the Sydney Opera House in 2020. The Four Seasons in hellish new climate change consequence new guise saw them tackle diabolically difficult structures and almost familiar repetitions to disturb, unsettle and warn our contentment.
This doom and gloom Dies Irae style re-imagining wedded the strings in each movement with tubular bells, snare drums, bowed xylophones and gong amongst other percussion options.
It was a shock to initially endure the real hatchet job on the spirit of every beloved movement in Vivaldi’s concerto. As the dramatically altered groove continued in contemporary sounding contamination.
Being able to witness SSO’s core string and percussion players with guest harpsichordist Dr Erin Helyard apply themselves to the harrowing technical demands of the new Vivaldi climate was impressive fare indeed.
This global project aiming to rob us of the usual sonic environments and marry the damaged result with scarily over-exposed and slow moving video imagery of seasonal scenes definitely achieved its thought-provoking and unsettling goal.
A Sydney Festival programme was the perfect atmosphere for offering such entropy shaped by real local weather data. Successive versions, planned to be different each time in other countries using their computer climate data will be interesting to monitor following Sydney’s strong result and powerful initial performance.
Above : SSO Concertmaster Andrew Havoren provided the violin solo part in this distorted version of The Four Seasons.
Andrew Havoren’s solid virtuosity warned us of the loss of our treasured Vivaldi environment in confident new character despite the harsh grotesquerie of changed direction and brusque new worlds for the Four Seasons storylines. He was supported in stunning delivery of challenging almost familiar variation playing by the talented SSO Strings.
For Sydney this Vivaldi meets Mad Max sound and image world could easily be used to argue the climate change cause convincingly, emphasizing what could be lost.
There was rewarding footage of the hardworking members of the orchestra on screens beside the stage. Landscape and weather imagery was restricted to the centre screen.
A larger or more widespread video presentation format for the visual component may have been even more well received and have had something of a more surround-cinema effect to match the impact of the music. It would also have given audience more captivating distraction and focus than on the challenging music element alone.
On this cool summer festival evening though the climate change cry for action was interestingly and forcefully communicated in this progressive and meaningful audio-visual experiment.
