This year, I thought it would be fun to share seasonal playlists inspired by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. My knowledgeable musician friend, Scott Noriega, was kind enough to take on the curation of these playlists. First up is winter and, boy, does nature certainly want to give us a good one this year!
Listen to the playlist by clicking the button above and read on for Scott’s insightful notes on the pieces. I would recommend pairing the Winter Playlist with a nice, heart-warming red wine like a Valtellina Rosso, Barbaresco, Aglianico or Sagrantino. Enjoy and stay warm!
Written by Scott Noriega
Scott is a pianist, writer and music teacher from Queens, NY where he currently resides. Having run the academic gamut of degrees – from Bachelors to Masters and finally PhD – he is currently living his life a bit more: writing poetry, searching out pianistic repertoire, baking pastries, composing new music, and traveling, all while exploring the world of cocktails, history and music weekly on Instagram @telling_cocktails.
Antonio Vivaldi
(1678, Venice – 1741, Vienna)
Violin Concerto in f minor
Where else to begin an Italian musical journey that takes us through the winter season than with perhaps one of the best-known works in all of Classical music – the final concerto from Antonio Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni – The Four Seasons: L’Inverno, Winter. Part of the charm of this work, other than the fabulous music, is the sonnet written by Vivaldi that accompanies the entire series of concertos, flowing from one movement to the next. Perhaps especially in Italian, less so the English translation. He describes both the physicality of the moment as well as the types of emotions and feelings that have come to define this season of year for us: from the first movement’s icy chill, the second’s sense of
warmth by the fire, to the third which deals with the unknown dangers as well as its many delights:
Allegro non molto
Aggiacciato tremar trà neri algenti
Al Severo Spirar d’ orrido Vento,
Correr battendo i piedi ogni momento;
E pel Soverchio gel batter i denti.
Largo
Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti
Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento.
Allegro
Caminar Sopra ‘l giaccio, e à passo lento
Per timor di cader gersene intenti;
Gir forte Sdruzziolar, cader à terra
Di nuove ir Sopra ‘l giaccio e correr forte
Sin ch’ il giaccio si rompe, e si disserra;
Sentir uscir dalle ferrate porte
Sirocco Borea, e tutti i Venti in guerra
Quest’ é ‘l verno, mà tal, che gioja apporte.
Quickly, but not too
Shivering, frozen amidst the frosty snow
And the harsh, biting winds;
Running to and fro, stamping my feet,
While my teeth chatter from the bitter chill.
Slowly, broadly
To rest peacefully beside the hearth,
While the rains outside drench everything.
Quickly
Walking the icy path cautiously,
For fear of tripping and falling,
slipping violently, crashing to the ground,
jumping back on the ice and running,
crossing it before it cracks and opens.
To hear past the iron gates, the Sirocca,
the Borreas, all the winds at war,
This is winter, but one that also brings joy.
Alfredo Casella
(1883, Turin – 1947, Rome)
A Notte Alta
If the winter can at times be icy and cold, it can also be, like Alfredo Casella’s tone poem titled A Notte Alta – The Deepest Night – still and static yet filled with heavy emotions.
The version for piano and orchestra (1921) not only beautifully depicts the two main characters of this story – a man and woman in fated love – but also gorgeously captures the essence of the third protagonist, the night itself, played by the orchestra, here “the mysterious atmosphere of the winter night, clear and cold, glacially insensible to human suffering.”
Giacomo Puccini
(1858, Lucca -1924, Brussels)
Che gelida manina from La Bohème
But really – who doesn’t love a passionate yet fated love story told during the coldest months of winter? Certainly, Giacomo Puccini did! In Act I of his 1896 opera La Bohème, set in the snowridden Latin Quarter in Paris over the holiday season, Rodolfo, a poor poet living in a garret with his artist friends, meets Mimì, his new neighbor, when she knocks on his door asking for help because her candle has gone out and she has lost her key. Together they search for it in the dark and as their hands touch, he feels how cold hers are in his. It
sparks an immediate connection, prompting Rodolfo to sing to her the heartwarming tenor aria which begins Che gelida manina. Se la lasci riscaldar – What a cold little hand! Let me warm it. Though life at times can feel hard and cold, perhaps especially in the heart of winter, Puccini reminds us that sometimes the greatest warmth in our lives stems from those in our life that we care for and love.
Ferruccio Busoni
(1866, Empoli – 1924, Berlin)
Piano Sonatina No. 4
Speaking of the holiday season… Subtitled “in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII” – on the day of the Nativity of Christ, 1917 – Busoni’s Fourth Sonatina was written during the composer’s years of isolation living in Zurich, Switzerland. But this is not holiday music. Busoni, then wearied by the ongoing and seemingly endless war in Europe which had already lasted over three years and tormented by his son’s conscription into military service in America, this little piano work was written as a plea for peace. And one can sense this when one listens.
A critic who attended the 1920 premiere felt that he could hear the “ringing of bells and Christmas atmosphere seen with the eyes and felt with the heart of an artist shaken by the griefs of the world.” One hears not only the peeling of bells here, but the chorales of the church, the stillness and weightlessness of the winter atmosphere, as well as feeling the emotional Weltschmerz – a world weariness – that so many of this age did as well.
Claudio Monteverdi
(1567, Cremona – 1643, Venice)
Hor che ‘l ciel e la terra e ‘l vento tace from Madrigals, Book 8 Monteverdi may best be known as one of the very first composers of a new dramatic form of music – his opera L’Orfeo (1607) premiered only 10 years after the very first recorded opera in history, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1598). But he was equally gifted in composing for smaller, yet in his hands, no less powerful forces such as those used in one of his very finest madrigals – Hor che ‘l ciel e la terra e ‘l vento tace, in English, Now that the sky, the earth, and the wind are silent – composed in 1638 for six singers, two violins, and basso continuo.
The opening here for me magically represents the silence that the night brings through its use of a slow- moving chordal progression – before, that is, Monteverdi introduces his newfound or newly-rediscovered musical trick: the stile concitato or agitated style that uses quick repeated notes, flitting trills, and dramatic running scales to depict the lover’s pain. Just listen to how these faster sections not only comment on the stillness of the chordal music but interrupt it. The lover’s pain – but music that could equally be felt as the chilly winter which encroaches upon the warmth of one’s innermost sanctity.
Giovanni Pergolesi
(1710, Iesi – 1736, Pozzuoli)
Stabat Mater: I. Stabat Mater Doloroso
The opening of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater long represented the icy chill of the winter before I ever knew what the accompanying Latin words meant: the painful hanging suspensions and the biting dissonances are palpable – one feels them physically. The opening movement sets just three lines of music, but words so poetic and meaningful that anyone who has ever felt loss can easily understand Pergolesi’s musical language. If the pain of a lover is biting in Monteverdi’s madrigal, the pain of a mother losing her child in Pergolesi’s setting is pure anguish:
Stabat mater dolorosa
juxta Crucem lacrimosa,
dum pendebat Filius.
The sorrowful mother was standing
beside the Cross, weeping,
As her Son was hung.
Painful, but oh so beautiful as the music depicts not just her sadness, but the absolute, unwavering and unconditional love that she has of her son. Pergolesi was only 26 when he wrote this massive 40-minute choral work – it would be among his last compositions, completed while staying in a Franciscan monastery in Pozzuoli, near Naples. He would succumb shortly thereafter, like so many in the era, to consumption or tuberculosis. But what a warm gift he left us in those last few winter months of his life!
Domenico Scarlatti
(1685, Naples – 1757, Madrid)
Sonata in b minor, K. 87
The key of b minor has long been associated with emotional gravity in such major works as Bach’s B- Minor Mass, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, and Liszt’s Piano Sonata. Though Scarlatti wrote almost 600 keyboard sonatas in his lifetime, this little one in b minor is special to me: its multiple voices ebb and flow, crossing over and under each other. And though at times, the harmonic weather seems to clear, it ultimately leads to a quiet resolution, though one frigid in the stillness of that final low B.
Giuseppi Verdi
(1813, Le Roncole -1901, Milan)
Les Vêpres siciliennes, Ballet des quatre saisons: L’Hiver
In the 1850s, after the successful staging of three of the most famous of his operas in Italy – Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), and La Traviata (1853) – Verdi challenged himself anew: to write a French Grand Opera for a premiere in Paris, France. Part of the challenge of writing a French Grand Opera was not only the scale of the work – five acts! – but also the inclusion of something one virtually never saw in any Italian or German opera of the day: ballet music! Though Verdi was not a fan of stopping the action of the story for spectacle’s sake, he readily accepted the task of writing ballet music, here using it as part of the court celebration in Act III Scene II. Perhaps because the winter music was the first of the four seasons introduced, it seems more jubilant than some of the other works on this list. There are certainly moments of silence and stillness found in this little work, but I’ve always felt it closer in spirit to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker in its sense of optimism and joy than to the tragedy one finds in many other winter works. Afterall, aren’t the best holidays celebrated in the coldest and darkest months of the year?
Alessandro Marcello
(1673, Venice – 1747, Venice)
Oboe Concerto in d minor
If Vivaldi’s wintry Violin Concerto contains moments of frigidity balanced by moments of warmth, then Alessandro Marcello’s D-Minor Oboe Concerto, composed in the early 1700s in Venice, feels at once lighter in mood, yet also more icy in the oboe’s continuous sighing motives in the opening Andante e spiccato. But warmth can be found: just listen to that most gorgeous of tunes in the second movement’s Adagio where the yearning quality of the singing oboe sits atop the cloud-like cushion of the string orchestra’s sound. If one is looking for comfort in the final movement’s Presto, though, one will find only the icy chill of winter with gaps of relief pushing the music into major key areas. The oboe’s pointillistic delivery of the fast running arpeggios and scales adds to the chill. It gets one’s bones shivering with its perpetual restlessness of movement and that final D-minor cadence. Brrrr! This is as close to opera as a concerto can get – and all in about 10 minutes!
Ottorino Respighi
(1879, Bologna – 1936, Rome)
Adoration of the Magi from Three Botticelli Pictures
At times winter seems like shades of black, white and gray. But as frigid as it may seem, for some – myself included – winter is magical, filled with all the colors of the rainbow. Based on one of Sandro Botticelli’s depictions of the nativity scene painted in 1475 – now hanging in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery – Respighi’s Adoration of the Magi gorgeously captures the rustic, yet also mystical qualities of the story.
From the rhapsodic solo woodwind parts – those slightly nasal-sounding bassoons and oboes – to the ringing of the bells, celesta and triangles, Respighi transports us not only to another place, but another time. The use of the Advent plainsong Veni, Veni Emanuel as well as the 18th-century Italian carol Tu scendi dalla stelle – with its opening lines that read: From starry skies descending, Thou comest, glorious King – helps to usher us into the winter season, but here in warm, radiant colors.
Luigi Dallapiccola
(1904, Pazin – 1975, Florence)
Piccola Musica Notturna
Though Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna can be translated into English just like Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik – that is, A Little Night Music – his musical language, here a byproduct of his studies of the twelve tone system, sense of proportion and overall mood come much closer to that achieved by Béla Bartók in the night-inspired pieces found in his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta or the Suite: Out of Doors. There is a calmness, a stillness that often translates to the nighttime for listeners, though for me, the mysterious harmonies of the opening along with the sudden outbursts seem to recall the winter chill – like slowly turning the corner on a frigid day, only to be met by a gust of wind that sends shivers down your entire body. This may be modernist dodecaphonic music, but never has it sounded as melodic, as coldly sensual as Dallapiccola makes it here.
Alfredo Catalani
(1854, Lucca – 1893, Milan)
Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from La Wally
When I think of winter, the beautiful snowy Alpine peaks of Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany often come to mind. When I imagine the Austrian Alps of Tyrol, just a short distance from Italy, across the imaginary border between these two countries, I can’t help but think of one of the most gorgeous arias from any opera: Catalani’s sorrowful Ebben? Ne andrò lontana – Well then? I’ll go far away – from his final opera La Wally. In the opera, Wally, a fiercely independent young woman caught in the raptures of love and pride, is pressured by her father, Stromminger, to marry a man she feels nothing for: Gellner. The man that she does love, Hagenbach, is the son of her father’s sworn enemy, so he forbids Wally from pursuing that relationship. So – as in most operas – Wally sings…
Ebben? Ne andrò lontana
Come va l’eco pia campana,
Là fra la neve bianca;
Là fra le nubi d’ôr;
Laddóve la speranza, la speranza
È rimpianto, è rimpianto, è dolor!
Well then? I will go far away
As the echo of the pious bell goes,
There somewhere in the white snow;
There amongst the clouds of gold;
Where hope, hope
Is regret, is regret, is sorrow!
Here stillness turns to heartbreak and finally acceptance. If tragedy is your cup of tea – for me, a cup of coffee, or perhaps better a glass of wine! – then the ending of La Wally should please. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that an avalanche takes a leading role in the outcome of this story.
Arcangelo Corelli
(1653, Fusignano – 1713, Rome)
Concerto grosso in g minor, op. 6 no. 8
Among my very favorite pieces to listen to as the weather starts to get colder is the late G-Minor Concerto grosso Fatto per la notte di Natale or ‘made for the night of Christmas’ by Arcangelo Corelli. Some pieces are transportative. This one brings me not only back to the early 1700s, but also makes me feel the glow of candles, the warmth of the fire, the quiet of the winter setting, the gentleness of the falling snow, as well as the setting itself: surrounded by cold, dark stones in the church or manor. When the final pastorale begins, one feels the stateliness and solemnity of the slow movements, and the rhythmic buoyancy and drive of the faster ones evaporate. In the end, here is the gentle rocking of the newborn’s cradle: one feels blanketed by the music’s warmth.
Baldassare Galuppi
(1706, Burano – 1785, Venice)
Keyboard Sonata in f minor, T. 9: I. Andante spiritoso
To end this musical journey, one that zigzagged back and forth through 400 years of Italian musical history, I’m returning to the musical key in which we began, that of Vivaldi’s Winter Violin Concerto. In Vivaldi’s hands, F Minor was tempestuous in quality. But in Galuppi’s hands, it is much gentler, much more filled with intriguing mystery than biting ferocity. This is not Baroque music with its contrapuntal severity, but music that is more lyrical and homophonic in nature, a newer Classical style of writing, favoring chords over lines and likely influenced by Galuppi’s love of opera buffa – a lighthearted, comic style of opera.
In this first movement of his F-Minor Sonata, an Andante spiritoso, one can feel the cold at the very beginning of the work. But this is intimate in character, not bombastic – like the chill one feels while alone, pondering the world. By the time the motion becomes more animated the mood has lightened, as though we are now watching the gentle snowflakes pile up outside the window, a few sticking to it for a moment before melting away.
