Music / Canberra Symphony Orchestra – Four Seasons, Llewellyn Hall,  October 18. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

This was an interesting concert by the strings of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the orchestra’s concertmaster Kirsten Williams.

The program combined the four violin concertos making up Vivaldi’s well known Four Seasons with Astor Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) which was written around 250 years later.

Both composers are using music to describe the world around them, the rural Italy of the early 18^th century in Vivaldi’s case and Buenos Aires of the 1960s in Piazzolla’s tango-inspired depiction of a busy city. Where Vivaldi writes bird calls, Piazzolla has car horns. What made effective and interesting programming was alternating the composers, starting off with Vivaldi’s Spring and continuing with Piazzolla’s Summer. The rest followed in order, finishing with Piazzolla’s Spring.

Both suites as performed are arrangements rather than the original scores. The Vivaldi was done with the stringed instruments only, leaving out any continuo instruments (such as a harpsichord), though with close to 30 string players on stage a harpsichord would be lost in any case. The Piazzolla suite was written for violin, electric guitar, piano, bass and bandoneon with the string orchestra arrangement done by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, at the request of Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, to match the Vivaldi scoring.

This was certainly an adventurous program to attempt for the CSO string players. It lacked a little in both a lightness of feel in the Vivaldi and a touch of the essential tango pulse in the Piazzolla.

For all that Kirsten Williams’ violin was assured and enthusiastic, supported solidly by the orchestra throughout with some excellent solo cello work from Samuel Payne.