Daniel Rowland - Richter: Recomposed: Vivaldi's Four Seasons (2024) [Hi-Res]

Daniel Rowland is a charismatic and adventurous violinist, director and chamber musician. With irrepressible energy, he musically intoxicates the musicians he plays with and those who listen to his performances and recordings. The members of his Stift Festival Orchestra mirror that energy and make this brilliant piece of Max Richter sound as cool, passionate, rough and intimate as it can be.

In a statement about 'Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons', Daniel declares that “it has been a huge pleasure to record these brilliantly imaginative, totally captivating and addictively energising seasons by Max Richter. I love the way the music morphs in and out of Vivaldi, using Vivaldi’s brilliantly colourful and endlessly evocative music as a springboard and inspiration for a new masterwork, brimming with electric energy and shimmering soundscapes very much of our time.”

Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons) could easily be the most famous piece of classical music ever composed, one of the first examples of ‘program music’. It is in many ways a groundbreaking, radical piece - one that by its fame has, as Max Richter says, “become part of the musical landscape and a part of my daily life”. Max Richter (*1966) is London-based composer who deftly blurs the lines between the classical and electronic worlds. His ‘post-classical idiom’ draws inspiration from diverse influences. Despite discarding 75 percent of Vivaldi’s original material in his ‘Recomposed, The Four Seasons’, Max Richter considers the Italian composer’s musical DNA omni-present in his reworking of the material. Richter’s remodelled version retains the basic shape, and much of the spirit, of the master's original four violin concertos, each season about ten minutes long in total and in three movements, sequenced fast-slow-fast. Artfully, but faithfully, Richter rearranges the notes on the page, revealing anew the radiant melodies and lush timbres of the music, and transforming a piece dulled by over-familiarity into something luminously relevant to the present day.