A New Season
Basic information
Project Title
Category
Project Description
“A New Season” stems from the need to reflect and help people reflect on the role of Man within the environment,offering the audience an interpretative key that goes beyond a traditional execution. Vivaldi describes an unspoiled nature. Quite different is the bitter vision of how Nature has been depleted by human intervention. This interpretation offers a “chiaroscuro” sound: on one hand, Nature as it was and could return to be, while on the other, Nature violated as we're unfortunately witness.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Here are Vivaldi and his Four Seasons again to say what has not been said yet and to play them as they have never been played before.
The eye of the world is seen as an aseptic container which reads the passing of time, the conquests, the catastrophes, and the aberrations between life’s lines, all beating the rhythm of the changes of the seasons, unmoved but suffering as of to record the climate and social changes. This is how the world and how humans change.
The idea behind the meaning of the Seasons aims at going beyond its context. It wants to give a voice to an idea inflamed by a passion for life,even if degraded,but still stubbornly in search for a new hope. Vivaldi’s world's no longer alive. Nature holds new voices.
Then, what is the meaning of these Seasons? What is the meaning of “A New Season”? How can the Aquila Soloists manage to say what has not been said yet and play what has not been played yet? They can, by choosing a new musical key that enhances the harmonic and rhythmic symmetries without compromising anything and by instead highlighting the sound unity of the orchestra. They can do so by choosing a classic instrumental language which has been modernized thanks to the use of atypical sounds.
The descriptive feature of this masterpiece brings to mind images that aim at becoming new ways of universally intelligible readings, yet with an innovative and experimental musical and instrumental content, so that one can render a new interpretation of an ever changing masterpiece. Two raw and crude languages here emerge, where music and images are used without metaphors, without hidden meanings, where two parallel lines can exceptionally meet to reveal man’s nudity and his pettiness in front of Nature and the disasters which have been provoked, created, and induced.
Perhaps “A New Season” will move souls with the violence of the primal and freeing scream which will start from the bottom of the Earth and will reach the hearts and consciences of people.
Key objectives for sustainability
The links between culture and the circular economy are little explored. On its own, culture cannot remove the barriers to moving to a circular economy. The performing arts are arguably the most powerful expression of life and the human condition in all its facets and allow us to connect to the whole through emotion. Expression and storytelling inspire and propel an understanding of life and the search for a better future through hope and renewal.
Classical music is continually reinvented in different ways by artists who interpret and communicate its message. Let's call it renewable energy. Music can therefore inspire cyclical thought processes and bypass consciousness to penetrate inspiration and innovation through creativity.
Human existence is an essential connection at its most basic level, namely: birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict and mortality. The cycle of life. This is the reality of every person on earth and by recognizing these aspects of humanity, through culture we can better communicate the values and importance of the circular value system through innovative and creative methods.
When the first printed edition of the Four Seasons was published, it was 1725. Vivaldi was the perfect interpreter of the spirit of his time, as well as the so-called “program music”, aimed at telling and describing nature throughout the months. There have been three successful centuries in concert halls all over the world, along with analyses and debates on the necessity of philological and alternative performances, or critics’ reviews and a lot of writing on the topic. This, until the performances of the Aquila Soloists and their first violinist, the sublime interpreter Daniele Orlando, who own Vivaldi’s masterpiece, by turning it into a musical gem. They interpret it in an original way, as they enrich it with a new meaning which goes beyond music, even if they tend to respect its circular dimension of starting and ending point.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The Four Seasons are one of Vivaldi's thematic concertos and represent remarkable examples of 'program music', compositions on the narrative or descriptive line of an extra-musical reference.
It is not simple imitation, but rather the idea that what is "beautiful" is so because it exists, it is associated with "truth", and that everything artistic that is created cannot come from nothing but from recognizing a pre-existing model in nature and reproducing it, reworking it, using another material.
Music transmits something to the listener, therefore it can be considered as a means of communication.
In the concerts of the Seasons the program is precise and articulated. The listener can follow the description and the evocation of natural events in a sort of musical narration without dramatization, where the theater takes shape in the mind, and where the hidden director is the composer, who guides us in reassuring and familiar territories, but at the same time unexplored, comprehensible because shared but at the same time subjective, evoking in the listener a sort of inner landscape.
In Vivaldi, the point of view is almost reversed: nature seems to take over and the landscape dominates over the human presence. Moreover, the extra-musical elements are integrated into the usual form of the concert without in any way modifying it.
Key objectives for inclusion
We are aware that the project needs a "Us". A great resource is the orchestra team. Our invitation is to take this step together... guided by music.
With the strength and the beauty of the music, it’s possible to perceive the "Charisma of Us": the charisma of a leader who puts the strength of the message before his individual charisma, who in front of the warmth and the roar of the applause seeks the embrace with the others of his extraordinary team.
Through the strength of the music, we look for a new feeling towards the nature that composes our life. The strength of the "charisma of shyness" that seeks and builds the strength of the "Us."
The Charisma of "Us" is what is needed in this time. To save nature. To promote always and everywhere the dignity of the human person.
When Aquila soloists play "The Four Seasons" warn you, but without judgment, denounce, but without self-proclaiming. Musicians who have taken the category of "cultured" music and made it their own, on one hand doing concerts in factories, hospitals, churches, prisons, schools, festivals and open places, and on the other hand a vision of institutional and civic responsibility, performing at the European Parliament in Brussels and at the Chamber of Deputies in Rome.
Results in relation to category
The project, which documents the essential role of music as a mean of contrast to social isolation and conveys the attention to a message of respect for the environment that surrounds us, provides the Association with a new and more effective way of promotion, capable of reaching new audiences well beyond the city and regional borders, and is the model for similar projects to be carried out in the future.
Through classical music we found a new way to spread a message of respect for the world around us, highlighting all the damage that man has caused to nature over the years: only with greater awareness we can preserve our Earth.
How Citizens benefit
In the last decade, the association has assumed a crucial role in the reconstruction of the social and cultural fabric of the city and of the surrounding areas after the earthquake of 2009.
In this context, also through the strengthening of the partnership with public, social private and educational institutions, it has promoted diversified activities in the field of qualification of the musical offer and of the live performance, of the musical education addressed to the new generations and, more widely, of the cultural promotion as an essential feature of the urban and social reconstruction.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
It has been a journey made primarily of study. Our concertmaster, Daniele Orlando, had to work for a long time on an innovative interpretation. He chose a new musical key that enhances the harmonic and rhythmic symmetries without compromising anything and by instead highlighting the sound unity of the orchestra. They can do so by choosing a classic instrumental language which has been modernized thanks to the use of atypical sounds, such as the succession between “bridge/key”, or thanks to the percussion of the chambers of stringed instruments. These have now become habits in music, but the Aquila Soloists make them extreme to the core, by choosing slow motions, total absence of vibrations which here becomes a disturbing element.
The descriptive feature of this masterpiece from the 1700s brings to mind images that aim at becoming new ways of universally intelligible readings, yet with an innovative and experimental musical and instrumental content, so that one can render a new interpretation of an ever changing masterpiece. Two raw and crude languages here emerge, where music and images are used without metaphors, without hidden meanings, where two parallel lines can exceptionally meet to reveal man’s nudity and his pettiness in front of Nature and the disasters which have been provoked, created, and induced. Still, man is in constant, painful, unconscious, or even already digested search for other and truer reasons to fight, to be born again, to carry on, and never stop believing.
Learning transferred to other parties
In all the contexts in which this project has been carried out, especially in schools, we have seen that the message delivered by the video is strengthened by the notes of our instruments: through the music the meaning of the displayed images is made stronger.
Music and images are universal languages that do not need translations, they both go straight to the heart without being communicated by words. Nature itself speaks to us, the notes tell us to try to respect it. Only in this way we can preserve our own existence by leaving to the future generations a world that is still capable of nourishing them...
