Classical Evergreen: The Four Seasons - NOSPR

The album Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is one of the most popular musical works of the 20th century. It stayed almost sixteen years on the Billboard magazine list, which collects the two hundred most bought and listened to recordings in the USA in a given week. In the world of popular music, the British band remains unsurpassed. So perhaps a worthy rival should be sought in musical scores and concert performances? Who has not listened at least once to Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?

Among the classical evergreens, however, Vivaldi's Four Seasons remains unrivalled. The popular violin concertos have received over a thousand recordings, one of which (Nigel Kennedy, 1986) has sold three million copies. They have also been played in at least five hundred films and undergone myriad remixes, the most popular of which is that by Max Richter, and perhaps the oldest was written by Bach himself. It is hard to believe that back in the 1940s, only some people remembered the then more than two-hundred-year-old works. Several pioneering recordings produced shortly afterwards made it clear to the world that no one could talk about feelings associated with atmospheric phenomena more beautifully than the Red Priest in the age of mass phonography and synthesisers. And yet, The Four Seasons is only just being rediscovered thanks to the exploration of historical performance. We wonder if the Red Priest would enjoy the A.D. 2025 version of {oh!} Orkiestra...      

Michał Mendyk

Concert duration: approximately 120 minutes