Max Richter (1966-)
Recomposed, Vivaldi's Four Seasons

Stift Festival Orchestra
Daniel Rowland, violon, direction

Il faut une certaine dose d’inconscience (et de bravoure) pour s’en prendre à un sommet du hit-parade classique de tous les temps, ce que fait le compositeur britannique Max Richter (1966-) avec cette re-composition des Quatre Saisons de Vivaldi, brillante et imaginative, noyautant l’œuvre originale pour mieux s’en extirper, se nourrissant de ses couleurs vives pour en électrifier l’énergie d’aujourd’hui, se faufilant dans ses contours saisonniers pour revivifier un cycle au fond sans fin. Le point de vue que développe Daniel Rowland et ses amis du Stift Festival Orchestra est assez différent de celui proposé il y a une bonne dizaine d’années par Daniel Hope et le Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin : rêche et vivant, parfois stoïque, il s’agit de capter l’excitation de la scène, de privilégier la vitalité et la spontanéité et, même si 75 % de la partition de Vivaldi disparaît au profit des nouvelles notes de Richter, ce parcours au long de quatre saisons garde un ADN profondément ancré dans l’écriture du compositeur italien de musique baroque. (Bernard Vincken)

Daniel Rowland is a charismatic and adventurous violinist, director and chamber musician. With irrepressible energy, he musically intoxicates the musicians he plays with and those who listen to his performances and recordings. The members of his Stift Festival Orchestra mirror that energy and make this brilliant piece of Max Richter sound as cool, passionate, rough and intimate as it can be. In a statement about 'Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons', Daniel declares that “it has been a huge pleasure to record these brilliantly imaginative, totally captivating and addictively energising seasons by Max Richter. I love the way the music morphs in and out of Vivaldi, using Vivaldi’s brilliantly colourful and endlessly evocative music as a springboard and inspiration for a new masterwork, brimming with electric energy and shimmering soundscapes very much of our time.” Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons) could easily be the most famous piece of classical music ever composed, one of the first examples of ‘program music’. It is in many ways a groundbreaking, radical piece - one that by its fame has, as Max Richter says, “become part of the musical landscape and a part of my daily life”. Max Richter (*1966) is London-based composer who deftly blurs the lines between the classical and electronic worlds. His ‘post-classical idiom’ draws inspiration from diverse influences. Despite discarding 75 percent of Vivaldi’s original material in his ‘Recomposed, The Four Seasons’, Max Richter considers the Italian composer’s musical DNA omni-present in his reworking of the material. Richter’s remodelled version retains the basic shape, and much of the spirit, of the master's original four violin concertos, each season about ten minutes long in total and in three movements, sequenced fast-slow-fast. Artfully, but faithfully, Richter rearranges the notes on the page, revealing anew the radiant melodies and lush timbres of the music, and transforming a piece dulled by over-familiarity into something luminously relevant to the present day.