Les Quatre Saisons at Rockhal

Birdsong, a barking dog, summer storms, drunken revellers and frozen landscapes: Vivaldi wrote all of them into The Four Seasons around 300 years ago, with a sonnet for each concerto describing what the music paints.

Les Quatre Saisons comes to the Rockhal Main Hall on Saturday 12 December. Doors at 18:30.

Vivaldi danced: a choreographic reading of the four seasons, produced by France Concert. The music is familiar enough that nobody needs preparing for it, which is what makes it work as a family evening.

Seated, and billed as a show for all ages. A December date in the Main Hall that has nothing to do with Christmas, which makes a change.

What is The Four Seasons?

The Four Seasons is Antonio Vivaldi’s best-known work: four concertos, one per season, written around 1718 to 1723 while he was court chapel master in Mantua. They were published in Amsterdam in 1725 as the first four of the twelve concertos of his Opus 8, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione.

Each concerto comes with a sonnet describing the season, its three parts matching the three movements. The music paints what the words describe: birdsong, a barking dog in spring, summer storms, drunken revellers and hunters in autumn, frozen landscapes and fires to warm up by in winter. It is one of the earliest detailed examples of music that tells a story. By 2011 around 1,000 recordings existed, and Nigel Kennedy’s 1989 version alone sold over three million copies.

The four concertos

• Spring, in E major (RV 269)
• Summer, in G minor (RV 315)
• Autumn, in F major (RV 293)
• Winter, in F minor (RV 297)

Each follows the same fast, slow, fast pattern, and the four together last about forty minutes.

This ballet

This production turns Vivaldi’s music into a story ballet. In a neglected garden, a statue wakes up with spring and slowly discovers movement, feelings, friendship and the world around it, before the tale moves on through summer and autumn into winter. Each season has its own sets and costumes, made for the show, and the dance blends classical ballet with contemporary movement. It is presented as a family show, and the same production also plays the Salzburgarena in April 2027.

The choreographer is Kristian Lever, a Finnish-British dancer and creative director who grew up in Helsinki. He trained at the Finnish National Ballet School, the Bolshoi Ballet Academy and the Palucca dance school in Dresden, then danced with Hamburg Ballet under John Neumeier. In 2019 he won the Erik Bruhn Prize for his choreography An Intimate Distance.