Four seasons vivaldi3/17/2024 ![]() ‘I wouldn’t let you within a million miles of them.’ Nigel, unperturbed, replied: ‘Shocking, your Royal Monstrette.’Ī month later, the EMI recording of The Four Seasons was released on LP, cassette and CD. After the concert, the BBC Radio 1 presenter Annie Nightingale introduced Nigel to the attending Royals and asked if Nigel should teach the violin to William and Harry. ![]() Nigel played the last movement of ‘Summer’ with the CBSO conducted by Sir George Martin, one-time producer to The Beatles. Wider fame arrived with a concert in aid of The Prince’s Trust in July 1989 attended by Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Six months later, Nigel began recording this CD. The Wogan Show and other TV appearances introduced Nigel to a wider audience. ‘What? Like Adrian?’ came the reply from another executive, and the objection was not raised again. It was suggested by one senior executive that no one called Nigel would ever make it. On 24 April 1986, Kennedy stepped up from the mid-price Eminence label to sign an exclusive contract with EMI Records UK, albeit in the face of some scepticism from the internal International Classical Division. Gramophone magazine gave it the ‘Record of the Year’ Award, and it received a gong from the early years of the Brit Awards for ‘Best Classical Recording’. It was Foster who championed Nigel’s recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, made at a fortnight’s notice in 1984. He left the hothouse environment at Stoke d’Abernon with his individuality intact and came to the notice of Simon Foster, the A&R manager at EMI’s budget classical label, Classics for Pleasure. And then there was Nigel Kennedy, a pupil of the Yehudi Menuhin School whose star was about to rise. Pundits had predicted a classical music boom, courtesy of the new digital sound carrier, the compact disc, but no one could foresee a world in which Three Tenors, glamorous violinists and Welsh mezzo-sopranos would dominate the pop charts. His death on 16 July marked the passing from the world of maestros to that of megastars. In 1989, the classical music industry came to terms with life after Herbert von Karajan. It topped the UK classical chart for over a year and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the bestselling classical recording ever. Nigel Kennedy’s recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons sold over three million copies around the world. It was the first time that commercial pop marketing techniques had been used in the classical world and the first time that Nigel was unleashed on the media. Vivaldi’s work, 12 movements in short three-minute bursts, was tailor-made for commercial radio. Originally recorded in November 1986 in the Church of St John-at-Hackney, London, it was a recording that would achieve unprecedented public and media attention and change the course of music history. Remembering that Venice was the epicenter of Italian opera at this time, it's not surprising that Carmignola and this group bring a very dramatic approach to the music.įor a full archive of NPR's Classical 50, click here.Nigel Kennedy’s recording was released on 25th September 1989 and went on to become one of the best-selling classical albums of all-time, selling over three million copies around the world. What sets Vivaldi apart as a composer is not just the quality of his ideas, but the vitality of their expression, and Carmignola picks up on that. There's a lot more to these concertos, and to Carmignola's performances, than simply getting the figuration of the pitches right. The Venice Baroque Orchestra, with violin soloist Guiliano Carmignola, gives it a gung-ho reading and brings a lot of theatricality to the music. The more I listen to period instruments, the more I like the way younger performers are doing this music. The faster pages can go at speed without sounding muddy or labored, producing a great deal of excitement - and that's what this recording has in spades. It's all there in the sonnet Vivaldi wrote, and it's there in the music as well.įor Vivaldi, it's important to have a period instrument ensemble and a Baroque violin because it allows the performer to play with lighter textures and crisper articulations. Nymphs dance a graceful gigue through the finale as the sun emerges from behind the clouds. Accordingly, "Spring," in the bright key of E major, celebrates the sounds of "joyful bird song," briefly interrupted as "gentle breezes give way to a passing storm." In the slow movement, a shepherd sleeps in the "pleasant flowering meadow," while a dog (the solo viola) barks. Vivaldi wrote an illustrative sonnet as a guide to each of the concertos.
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