The four seasons for the 21st century!
New album builds bridges between cultures and traditions, when danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen sheds new light on original compositions by Vivaldi and Respighi. The album is a conversation between past and present, between classical composition and new discoveries, between composers over time spans.
Karl Aage Rasmussen (b. 1947) has always explored the experiencing of time and motion with keen curiosity. In the 2015-17 period, he was linked to the Baroque orchestra Concerto Copenhagen as house composer, and it is the result of this collaboration that can now be presented in the form of the album The Four Seasons – after Vivaldi.
Amazement at the familiar
On the album, Vivaldi’s famous concertos The Four Seasons can be heard in a new version, one which ushers the famous work into the 21st century. The point of departure for Rasmussen’s re-composition is the idea that a musical interpretation is always time-bound, that it is inevitably subject to the conceptual frameworks that apply when it takes place. This is how the composer puts it:
»I had a wish to hear how Vivaldi’s Four Seasons perhaps would sound like were modern ears to hear them with similar amazement as that which Vivaldi’s audience must have felt.« – Karl Aage Rasmussen, 2019
Underscoring the aspects of Vivaldi’s music that foreshadows the conception later periods were to have of rhythm and musical idiom, Rasmussen allows rhythmical drive and repetitions – elements that in many ways are characteristic of our own age’s most widespread forms of music – to come to the fore. Thereby our own perception of other and new aspects in the familiar work is possibly enhanced.
Apart from The Four Seasons, the new release also contains Rasmussen’s adaptation of the Italian Ottorino Respighi’s orchestral suite Gli uccelli (The Birds) from 1928 – based on bird-imitations from the Baroque period.
Music video and concerts are to follow the release
The new album is released this Friday and will be followed up by a tour by Concerto Copenhagen featuring The Four Seasons – After Vivaldi which will take them to the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden – and also include a concert in Dronningesalen at The Royal Library on 1 November.
In addition, two of the movements of the work will be released as a music video – first exclusively on Apple Music during the fortnight starting on 20 September – subsequently also on YouTube.