[PostMinimalist]

Hi Christi.
That's quite good news about your Christmas program. I trust you will take the trouble to go and hear these pieces of wonderful music.
I case you don't know 'The Four Seasons' in this instance is a set of four concertos for solo violin and string orchestra. That means that a soloist will stand infront of a small orchestra consisting of Violins, violas (like violiins but a bit bigger) celli (the plural of cello) and double basses, and play a difficult piece of music. The orchestra will play sometimes simple accompaniment and other times will play some thing that souds like the music that the soloist plays.
Each concerto is made up of three seperate 'movements' and last about 12-15 minutes
so it will take about an hour to play the whole 'cycle'. They were written over 300 years ago by a very famous Italian composer Called Antonio Vivaldi. He was a preist who taught music at an all girls school in Venice. He had masses of flowing red hair which earned him the nick-name 'The Red Preist". He wrote hundreds of concertos for various instruments, usually for girls under his supervision at the school. He found a very useful formula for his concertos consisting of 3 movements (fast-slow-fast) and was sometimes accused of not writing 400 different concertos but of writing 1 concerto 400 times.
Whatever you make of them, they are a delight to listen to and stil as lively as they were 300 years ago!
Happy listening Christi
FC

 

[PostMinimalist]

In classical music works are often made up of several short pieces that are meant to be played one after the other with only a short pause in between. The audience generally doesn't clap in these pauses but waits till the end of the whole piece, reserving his appreciation for the end. These short sections are called Movements and are usually like complete pieces which can be played separately if the performer wants. A concerto usually has three movements and a dymphony generally has four. These are not rules and you can sometimes find exceptions like Mahler (German composer of the late romantic era he lived from 1860 till 1911) who wrote nine complete symphonies some of which have more than four movements and last for over an hour!
Did you get a chance to listen to The Four Seasons, or at least some of them?
What was your impression?
Was the soloist up to the task?
Were they playing on modern instruments?
Who was conducting?
Who was the soloist?
Did you find anything else out about Vivaldi?
Did you find pictures of Venice, Italy on the internet?
Christi, try answering these in a paragraph with out using copy and paste or 'quote' and we'll continue from here.
Cheers
FC