Five Seasons

With "Five Seasons," Dorothee Oberlinger and Edin Karamazov transform Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" into a chamber music program about the passage of time. The four concertos from "Le quattro stagioni" are performed in special arrangements for recorder and lute, supplemented by works by Giovanni Zamboni Romano, Johann Georg Pisendel, Henry Purcell, and Imogen Holst. The arc to the present day is bridged by "Circle of Life" by Boris Blank (the musical mastermind behind the Swiss electro-pop band Yello), which emerged from joint improvisations by Oberlinger and Karamazov.

At the heart of this is the idea of a "fifth season": Imogen Holst's "The Fall of the Leaf" describes the transition between summer and autumn, that brief moment of pause before nature changes. The two interpolated preludes by Zamboni Romano and Pisendel, as well as Purcell's "A new Ground in E minor," also address the themes of time, change, and recurrence in different ways. Thus, Vivaldi's familiar seasonal cycle is transformed into a program that combines historical music, arrangement, and improvisation.