The sold-out audience at the National Concert Hall on Friday came for Max Richter's Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, performed by the Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen, leading the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. They got, as a bonus, 45 minutes more of music in the same vein.
To say that this was a filmic evening is to state the blindingly obvious. Samuelsen, in programme notes and comments on stage, said most of the pieces were selected to create an aural portrait of her own life as a mother, celebrating the birth of her second child. The concert started with American composer Bryce Dessner's Lullaby (Song for Octave), a slight but catchy violin-piano lullaby for his newborn son, with arpeggios reminiscent of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel. It was followed by the “Cambridge, 1963” portion of the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's much praised soundtrack to The Theory of Everything. This got a thrilling rendition by the RTÉ players, who throughout the evening recreated that special effect that seamlessly played film music has in a cinema.
Italian pianist and composer Olivia Belli's Sapias – whose title perhaps refers to a newborn tasting its new environment – featured a plangent violin line that the programme described as “the sound of an embrace”. An orchestration of Polish pianist Hania Rani's Glass gave Samuelsen a lovely, repeated refrain, suggestive of a child asking the same question over and over. The pace picked up with jazz pianist Nils Frahm's intense and insistent Hammers – the same child, this time throwing a tantrum?
There was a sampling of Richter before the interval with the “She Remembers” segment from the television series The Leftovers, featuring a melancholy violin melody, over a delicate background of piano and strings. This was followed by Pärt's mystical, mysterious Fratres, which sounds Gothic and modern at the same time. The rapport between Samuelsen and the orchestra was superb.
That rapport was necessary to see Samuelsen and the ensemble through the virtuoso challenges of Richter's Recomposed. That this is not the 17th-century Venetian composer's original is clear from the outset when the orchestra and violinist's cheery take on chirping birds in Spring 1 is overlaid by Richter's ominous progression of synthesiser chords beginning with C sharp minor.
The German-born British composer has said he wrote his version to rescue Vivaldi's original from its fate as telephone “hold music”. In doing so he has stripped out 75% of what Vivaldi wrote. So instead of the usual brilliant depictions of village and country life, with sound images of barking dogs, drunken dancers, the hunt and its prey, we mostly get the Four Seasons' greatest hits, underpinned by orchestra and synthesiser. Samuelsen was stunning in the famous virtuoso cadenzas and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra played to match. But delicate and subtle this was not. What happened to the lilting dance in Winter 2, and what's with the jagged rhythms in Autumn 1?
Not the real Vivaldi... but the audience loved it.
