The Four Seasons get the Ronnie Scott’s treatment, and blossoms!
Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons for the girls of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage where he taught and where his young female students were both his orchestra and his inspiration. Three hundred years on, Lizzie Ball and James Pearson’s new arrangement puts women back at its centre as bandleaders. The band comprises a piano, percussion and five strings, violins, viola, cello and a double bass. This is a rare treat in itself as these are musicians who don’t often get to play together as this a unit, each of them busy with their own careers, it is a treat to watch them fall into step with one another for one night only. Each of the four concerti was preceded by its corresponding sonnet, the verses Vivaldi is thought to have set to music line by line and is a useful reminder that this piece has always been about storytelling.
Spring opened with Lizzie Ball on the violin, the ensemble tearing through Vivaldi’s famous first movement with a heat that had nothing to do with the season being depicted and everything to do with the sheer joy radiating off the stage. The piano peeled away into a solo of its own before the strings crept back to meet it. Ball’s adaptation of Spring is Here created a sense that the whole room seemed to lean in like being let in on a secret – her voice makes every syllable feel like a confession, drawing the audience in for the start of an intimate evening at Ronnie’s .
Where Spring had been all sunlight, Summer built through a run of Pearson’s piano solos before tipping into an almost jazz medley, which is exactly what you’d expect of musicians who trained on Bach and also happen to love a bit of Ronnie Scott’s. Gabriella Swallow on cello was absolutely magnificent throughout with a physicality to her playing that you feel is authentic, while Misha Mullov-Abbado’s double bass gave the ensemble its pulse. Autumn saw a change of leadership, with Ruth Rogers stepping forward on violin while the rest of the band stayed seated around her, part conductor, part MC. Winter opened on string stabs that channelled Vivaldi’s own icy tremolos before the encore.
Rather than Joni Mitchell’s Winter, the group played A Case of You, Ball singing again with even more directness and sheer emotion. Percussion was paired with a maracas from Julian Poole, and Rachel Roberts stole the segment on viola. They closed, fittingly, with one of Vivaldi’s minor-key double concerti, Ball and Rogers trading the spotlight in a finale that leaned hard into the composer’s own habit of letting two soloists chase each other to the very end.
It’s worth noting four of the seven musicians were women, and they held every leadership role in the room, violin, viola and conducting. This is the kind of evening that reminds you why live music, played by people who clearly love playing it together, still beats anything else on a Monday night.
Ronnie Scott’s Classical All Stars performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Re-imagined at Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, London on Monday 3rd August.