Boston Baroque Performs Vivaldi's The Four Seasons This March

Boston Baroque returns to Vivaldi's masterworks, The Four Seasons and Gloria in D, along with Monteverdi's Beatus Vir this March, featuring Concertmaster Christina Day Martinson and conducted by Music Director Martin Pearlman. Two performances of this program will take place at NEC's Jordan Hall-the first, on Friday, March 27 at 8pm, and the second on Sunday, March 29 at 3pm. Pre-concert speaker Laury Gutiérrez, founding director of La Donna Musicale, will give a talk before both performances at 7pm and 2pm.

Inspired by the evocative landscape paintings of Italian artist Marco Ricci, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) composed The Four Seasons as four separate concerti (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter). Among the most beloved pieces of classical music today, the works were first published in Amsterdam in 1725, being circulated and performed widely in Vivaldi's time. Many of his contemporaries, including Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), were fascinated with Vivaldi's development of the solo concerto, often transcribing works like The Four Seasons to their preferred instrument.

Boston Baroque's interpretation looks closely at the historical performance practice of the day, and as such can be differentiated from other performances. The most notable distinction can be found in the slow movements, which feature ornamentation in the solo lines where the score has none written. From Bach's transcriptions of Vivaldi's work, it was common practice during the Baroque period for soloists to ornament this music depending on the player's personal style and taste, and Boston Baroque's performance reflects that tradition.

Christina Day Martinson, Boston Baroque's GRAMMY-nominated concertmaster, will be the featured soloist on The Four Seasons. As The Boston Globe noted in 2016, "though this quartet of violin concertos is among the most popular items in the recorded repertoire, live performances as good as the one soloist Christina Day Martinson gave... are few and far between." She can be heard on Boston Baroque's recording of the work for Telarc.

One of sacred music's most uplifting choral works, Vivaldi's Gloria in D, will feature Boston Baroque's renowned chorus. Modern day interest in Vivaldi's vocal works spiked in the late 1920's, when the composer was in the midst of a revival after falling out of favor in the nineteenth century. The Gloria is a setting of a single movement from the Catholic Mass ritual, although this composition is in all probability a complete work rather than a fragment, as it was typical in Vivaldi's lifetime to write individual Mass movements for specific occasions. As the three vocal soloists are all women, the music is suspected to have been written for a girls' orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi was music director. The limited orchestration (strings, single oboe, and single trumpet) suggests this as well. Boston Baroque soloists for the Gloria are drawn from the chorus and include sopranos Olivia Miller and Kelley Hollis, and alto Margaret Lias.

The program begins with Claudio Monteverdi's (1567-1643) dramatic six-voice setting of Psalm 112, Beatus Vir. Monteverdi was the director of music for St. Mark's Basilica in Venice during most of his career. Towards the end of his life in 1641, he published a collection of religious works that included Beatus Vir (Blessed is the man), although the work had been composed most likely years earlier. This work mixes elements of Monteverdi's secular music into the sacred setting, similarly to his treatment of inserting music from his opera Orfeo into his well-known Vespers service. Beatus Vir features Boston Baroque's chorus.

Single tickets begin at $25, and can be purchased online at bostonbaroque.org or by calling the Boston Baroque offices at 617-987-8600.

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