Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Sacred Concertos
David Juritz (violin and director); London Mozart Players
Naxos DVD 5.110001
This DVD—Naxos’s inaugural foray into the format, if the catalogue number is to be trusted—presents a curious hybrid: eighteen static images, one per movement, married to a live recording of Vivaldi’s warhorse cycle plus two sacred concertos. The concept sounds unpromising on paper. Yet there’s more intelligence at work here than first appears.
The images themselves avoid the cardinal sin of literalism—no montage of Alpine meadows or crashing surf, thank heaven. Instead, each movement receives a single photograph: rain-spattered leaves for the slow movement of Autumn, gathering storm clouds for Summer‘s first movement. Simple enough that the imagination can still roam. Those who find even this intrusive can simply turn off the monitor and treat the disc as audio-only, which may be the wisest course.
The London Mozart Players emerge as the disc’s principal asset. Their opening ritornello in “Spring” breathes with genuine affection—those crescendos suggest actual breezes rather than the huffing and puffing one sometimes encounters. This is an ensemble of considerable collective intelligence: leader Yuri Zhislin and first cello Sebastian Comberti are both acknowledged soloists, and the notes properly list all the players. Well, nearly all—the harpsichordist, who delivers some exquisite work in Autumn‘s slow movement, remains mysteriously anonymous.
David Juritz directs from the violin with a light touch and reasonable awareness of period practice, though he’s no slave to it. No ugly mid-note swells here, no fashionable gruffness of tone. His ornamentation in slow movements is extensive—the "Largo" of “Spring” acquires perhaps three times the notes Vivaldi wrote down—and mostly tasteful. He knows when to pull the tempo around for dramatic effect: those gathering clouds in Summer genuinely lour.
But here’s the rub. What begins as pleasure in Juritz’s unexaggerated approach gradually curdles into impatience with his limited tonal palette. Too much of his solo playing exhibits a forthrightness that, after forty minutes, begins to pall. He’s rhythmically four-square in the “Danza Pastorale” "finale" of “Spring” where his colleagues catch the music’s lilt beautifully—listen to them dance while he trudges. The stop-start choreography between soloist and ensemble in Autumn‘s first movement (those haystack revelers) feels less like interpretive whimsy than uncertain execution.
The pinsharp album proves a mixed blessing. It captures the orchestra’s nuances with admirable clarity. It also exposes traffic noise in the last three concertos—the church of St Silas the Martyr sits in Chalk Farm, after all—and catches Juritz technically slack at several points. Staccato runs in Summer‘s "finale" lack crispness; a long-held note in Autumn‘s first movement loses bow control at its conclusion. These aren’t major crimes, but the microphones give them nowhere to hide.
The two bonus concertos for the Feast of the Assumption (RV 581 and 582) are curiosities, really—the D major’s endless I-IV-V progressions in the first movement hardly quicken the pulse, though the unusual scoring for two orchestras makes for impressive surround-sound effects. Here the visual strategy collapses entirely: gloomy cloisters and overexposed, unfocused altarpieces that reek of desperation. Religious kitsch in service of what? The music doesn’t need these crutches.
Still, for the minimal outlay Naxos asks, the Four Seasons alone justifies the purchase. The London Mozart Players deserve better than they get from their director, but they play with such collective sensitivity that one forgives much. Just don’t expect revelations—or, perhaps more honestly, don’t expect the soloist to match the excellence of his ensemble. There are worse ways to spend an hour with Vivaldi, and the option to banish those images altogether makes this a more flexible proposition than most multimedia experiments.
