Four Plus Four: Moody's mixing of Seasons a success

By: By Ken Keuffel | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: October 19, 2009

A change in plans can bring highly satisfying results -- which Robert Moody, the music director of the Winston-Salem Symphony, demonstrated yesterday when he led that group in a program called "The Four Seasons" at the Stevens Center.

Vivaldi's The Four Seasons was to have been played, uninterrupted, from beginning to end; Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires would follow in similarly unbroken fashion. Moody replaced this format with one in which the symphony went back and forth between these two pieces, playing a section of one work and then a section of another until both works were finished. Merritt Vale, the symphony's executive director, announced the change just before the concert began and right after intermission, Moody likened it to his preference for eating parts of a meal at different times, rather than finishing off one course followed by another.

Everything else went as planned. Violinist Danielle Belén, who won the 2008 Sphinx Competition for black and Latin string players, soloed in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. She's a great talent, able to play with technical skill and expression.

And Corine Brouwer, the symphony's concertmaster, soloed in Piazzolla's effects-filled Seasons. This piece, as David Levy's excellent program notes remind us, emerged in its current form only when Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged four pieces by Piazzolla for solo violin and strings, making clever references to Vivaldi's Seasons in the process. Brouwer owned every bar of her solo parts, capturing their humor and sensuality.

Vivaldi and Piazzolla inhabited radically different worlds. The former masterfully expressed a style of baroque Venice; the latter created art out of the tango of the 20th-century Argentina.

But to hear the two Seasons in the way they were presented yesterday was to revel in their similarities more than their differences. Great rhythm is great rhythm, wherever it originates. Same goes for memorable melody.

Rhythm sizzled with fire and precision, making the ensemble fare in Vivaldi's Four Seasons sound more unforgettable than it usually does. And melody came off with style; witness, for example, Brooks Whitehouse wonderful solo in the "Fall" section of Piazzolla's Seasons.

kkeuffel@wsjournal.com

727-7337

Yesterday's program by the Winston-Salem Symphony will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Stevens Center. For tickets, call 721-1945.