Late August is a superb time for a drive up to Angel Fire, and on Thursday, August 29, you can combine the scenery with the final concert in Music from Angel Fire’s 2024 season. Just one warning: You’ll be two years older than when you left. The featured repertory is Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Astor Piazzolla’s Southern Hemisphere reinterpretation, The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires , each of which vividly depicts outdoor activities during a year traveling around the sun.
Vivaldi’s version consists of four violin concertos, each prefaced with a sonnet (possibly written by the composer) specifying the inspiration for the music. Here’s the beginning the first sonnet: Spring has arrived, and joyfully the birds greet her with glad song, while at Zephyr’s breath the streams flow forth with a sweet murmur. Her chosen heralds, thunder and lightning, come to envelope the air in a black cloak; once they have fallen silent, the little birds return anew to their melodious songs .
.. Multiple different birds tweeting, streams burbling, thunder rolling, and lighting crackling are heard in rapid succession, setting the pattern for the entire piece.
Vivaldi put matching capital letters next to lines in the sonnet — such as “a furious swarm of flies and blowflies,” “hailstones chop off the heads of proud cornstalks,” and “the drunken hunters asleep” — and to the corresponding effect in his music. In addition, he also added some written instructions to t.