New Year's Concert • The Eight Seasons of Vivaldi and Piazzolla

This year the Philharmonic of the Teatro Comunale of Bologna has chosen to celebrate the beginning of 2024 with a cycle rarely performed in its entirety and which will be heard for the first time in our city, in the sign of abundance, of love for nature and for all humanity.

In 1998, the great violinist Gidon Kremer had the idea of having Leonid Desyatnikov arrange the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas) by Astor Piazzolla, written between 1965 and 1970, according to the instrumentation of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, published in 1725, achieving an extraordinary result, capable of bringing two masterpieces born almost 250 years apart into dialogue on a "pop" terrain. At first it seemed like a bold combination, also because the Red Priest with his masterpiece had managed to capture the most detailed aspects of nature in music, while Piazzolla had purposely avoided a realistic description, focusing more on the emotional aspects of the passing of the seasons. Instead, thanks to these apparent internal contrasts, the journey from the eighteenth century in Venice to the twentieth century in Porteño completes an introspective parable, with the gaze moving from the surrounding nature to the landscapes of the human soul. The project unity, thanks to the fact that Buenos Aires is located in the southern hemisphere and therefore the seasons flow in an inverted manner compared to what happens in Europe, is also achieved intelligently through the choice to follow Vivaldi's Primavera with Otoño Verano di Piazzolla, in a crossed order up to Verano porteño which thus closes a cycle that seems to never end.