About this Piece

Vivaldi’s Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter were the first four of the 12 concertos in his Opus 8, The Contest Between Harmony and Invention, published in 1725. Together they comprise Vivaldi’s Seasons, with virtually every passage describing the events set out in a sonnet accompanying each of the concertos. There are also descriptive directions to the players that are not in the sonnets. This extramusical symbolism did not suit everyone’s taste, and the most savage critics were the musicians most opposed to Vivaldian flashiness in the first place.

Two centuries later, Astor Piazzolla faced another sort of argument about propriety. If the distance of time makes it hard to appreciate Vivaldi’s true importance, geographical and cultural distance obscures the position of Piazzolla, who occupies something of a fringe position in the Eurocentric classical world.

Piazzolla was rooted in the world of the tango. Like the tango, he was born in Buenos Aires, and similarly, he quickly went elsewhere, moving with his parents to New York’s Little Italy when he was 4. In his teens, he returned to Buenos Aires, where he studied composition with the eminent Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera and played the bandoneon, a type of accordion (with buttons instead of keys), in tango orchestras.

Setting out on his own, Piazzolla quickly moved beyond the boundaries of traditional tango. His music expanded the use of dissonance and complex harmony and rhythm, and he incorporated elements picked up from the classical and jazz repertoire. It forsook the dance hall for the concert hall, where his audiences were more likely to be classical or jazz fans than tango aficionados.

And yet Piazzolla’s non-tango influences made him a controversial figure among those aficionados. “I have had enough of people telling me that what I am playing is not tango,” he said. One tango purist is said to have threatened him with a gun in the 1950s. Whether coincidentally or not, he left Argentina for Paris in 1954 to study with Nadia Boulanger, who convinced him that he was, after all, a tango composer. He returned from Paris and formed the quintet (violin, bass, piano, guitar, and bandoneon) that inspired his best-known work in what he called “the New Tango.” Neither fish nor fowl, his music was destined for either the obscurity that befalls work that never finds an audience or the prominence that comes with appealing to multiple audiences that marketers call “crossover.” Toward the end of his life, Piazzolla’s music crossed over in a big way.

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, completed in 1970, are themselves fairly well traveled. Like much of his music, they have been arranged for a host of different instrumentations: Piazzolla recorded them with his own groups, and other versions include solo guitar and piano trio. The version heard tonight is a fairly free adaptation (by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, arranged for solo violin and orchestra in 1996–98) made with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in mind: The numerous quotations from Vivaldi (sometimes interpolated and sometimes worked into the fabric of the music) are not from Piazzolla’s pen. But keep in mind that Piazzolla’s own performances of his music were often full of improvisation, so additions or alterations by performers or arrangers can be seen as part of the game.

—Howard Posner