Sure, we all have our favorite composers, but who’s your favorite re-composer? If the term is not on your radar, that’s understandable: It’s typically only used in reference to the contemporary classical auteur Max Richter, who, back in 2012, turned his postmodern, post-minimalist ears to Vivaldi’s masterpiece, The Four Seasons, and created Recomposed. Structured, like Vivaldi’s celebrated 18th-century string concerti, with three movements for each season, plus additional “electronic soundscapes” on the Deutsche Grammophon album where it premiered, Richter’s reimagining of the canonical work won critical acclaim for its mix of inventiveness and historical relevance.
Indeed, it quickly became almost as omnipresent as Vivaldi’s original, used to soundtrack television series as disparate as My Brilliant Friend, Bridgerton, and Chef’s Table. But, as it turned out, Richter wasn’t finished with his time-traveling. In 2022, he released a new album, The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed, which had a slightly different approach. This Saturday, March 8th, Memphians will be able to hear this latest take on Vivaldi in person, with a live performance by Iris Collective at the Crosstown Theater, led by Elena Urioste, the virtuoso violinist featured in Richter’s most recent recording of Recomposed.
Urioste, a Philadelphia native, is one of the finest violinists of her generation, having won the Sphinx Competition for young players of minority backgrounds at an early age, then making her debut at Carnegie Hall in 2004. In 2012, she was named a BBC New Generation Artist. And so it was no great surprise when she was recruited to play on Richter’s New Four Seasons album two years ago. But it wasn’t your typical classical recording session.
“The first recording [of Recomposed] that Max released was with Daniel Hope as the violin soloist, and it’s just been so unbelievably successful,” she notes, speaking from her current home in London. “It’s performed all the time around the world in all sorts of different settings. And I think it’s such a powerful piece, and I think it also attracts a lot of different types of listeners. But anyway, the first recording was so successful that for its 10th anniversary, Max wanted to re-record the piece with everyone playing on gut strings and using period bows. So he enlisted me for that project, and we all came together and made this recording in December of 2021, with him playing a vintage synthesizer. I don’t know a whole lot about synthesizers, but he spoke very passionately about this one that he used for the project.”
For Memphis gearheads, the internet reveals that Richter used a vintage Moog keyboard, though the model is not specified. More to the point, using violins that could have been made in Vivaldi’s era took the piece back to an edgier time. “All of us were on gut strings, using Baroque bows. So it was cool to combine looking backwards and implementing historical performance techniques, feeling the purity of sound that gut strings afforded us, but also combined with what Max spoke of as a punk aesthetic. He really enjoyed the grittiness of using this sort of equipment. So I think it all came together in a really cool way, and we’re very proud of the recording.”
Indeed, the new version seems to loom large in the composer’s own view. As he told writer Clemency Burton-Hill, “I see this as a multidimensional project. It’s a new trip through this text using Vivaldi’s own colors, so you have different eras talking to one another.” He further reflected on using the ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra to back Urioste. “It’s also recomposing the social structure of our classical music culture to some extent, and focusing on different perspectives, which is really exciting and important to me,” he said. “I don’t see this as a replacement, but it is another way of looking at the material. It’s like shining a light through something from a fresh angle … as if a layer of dust has been blown off.”
It was a profound experience for Urioste. “Since we made the recording, I’ve performed it in a lot of different scenarios, sometimes with Max. We played it in Berlin and in a pavilion in London for Earth Day, using amplification. And then I’ve also played it really bare bones, just acoustically, even without the synthesizer. So this Iris performance will be the latter. There won’t be synthesizer. We won’t be amplified. It’ll just be the strings, just the music itself. But I think it works so beautifully in all of these different forms.”
The show will also be a homecoming of sorts for Urioste, who’s been associated with what is now the Iris Collective for years, culminating in her appearance as a featured soloist with them on a violin concerto by Korngold. “I did so many concerts with the Iris Orchestra in my early 20s,” she says, “and when I went back to play the Korngold seven years ago, there was a real sense of returning to a very healthy place, and I’m hoping to see some familiar faces there on this visit. I hope I see people who I knew back in the day.”
Beyond that, she looks forward to bringing the Richter work she knows so well to the land of her birth. “I mean, I am American,” she says, “and it’s always nice to return to home turf. Although, to be honest, the home turf is kind of terrifying for me at the moment.”
