Following up on his successful Vivaldi Recomposed album, English violinist Daniel Hope offers a new take on Vivaldi's Four Seasons that's not as outwardly experimental, but certainly equally novel. After an attractive, but not pathbreaking, set of the Four Seasons themselves, you get 12 pieces, each corresponding to one month of the year, plus a short Brahms encore. The connections of these pieces to their specific months may be pretty tenuous (February, an excerpt from Rameau's Les Indes galantes, is the most tenuous), but ...
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Following up on his successful Vivaldi Recomposed album, English violinist Daniel Hope offers a new take on Vivaldi's Four Seasons that's not as outwardly experimental, but certainly equally novel. After an attractive, but not pathbreaking, set of the Four Seasons themselves, you get 12 pieces, each corresponding to one month of the year, plus a short Brahms encore. The connections of these pieces to their specific months may be pretty tenuous (February, an excerpt from Rameau's Les Indes galantes, is the most tenuous), but there's an X factor of sheer adventurousness in the album's favor. Hope moves from traditional repertory (Tchaikovsky, Schumann) to Amazing Grace (in an odd, electric rock arrangement), Max Richter from the earlier Vivaldi album, and the electronic musicians Aphex Twin and Chilly Gonzales (with one work by the latter, Les doutes d'août, recorded here for the first time). It testifies to the strength of Hope's musical personality that, although he's in no way a self-aggrandizing...
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