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Artist: Luka Faulisi
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Vivaldi - The Four Seasons

Luka Faulisi breathes new life into Vivaldi’s iconic  “The Four Seasons”

On his second album for Sony Classical, violinist Luka Faulisi presents a highly individual interpretation of Vivaldi’s pioneering masterpiece, The Four Seasons.  Berlin, April 12, 2024: Violinists from every generation have responded to Vivaldi’s set of four violin concertos, whose descriptions of the natural world broke new ground three centuries ago. Faulisi, who was raised in France by an Italian father, feels a ‘three way affinity’ with the Venetian priest and composer that ‘traverses the national, the instrumental and the spiritual.’

With his new recording, Faulisi was determined not to simply ‘make one more version’ of Vivaldi’s work. ‘People rarely examine the composer’s thinking or his vision of nature,’ the violinist says. As in Faulisi’s debut album, Aria, storytelling is to the fore. The violinist’s cinematic approach to The Four Seasons involved encouraging members of the orchestra to engage with the composer’s onomatopoeic animal and nature sounds and adding percussion not found in the original scores.

An important stimulus was artistic director of {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna, Martyna Pastuszka, who conducts the recording. ‘We hit it off intellectually from the very outset,’ Faulisi says of her. ‘We had exactly the same idea about what we wanted to do with The Four Seasons. We wanted to make a film, a kind of soundtrack that would better capture all the emotions and all of the moods.’

Luka Faulisi:

Aria

Among the operatic jewels included are Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy (as made famous by Jascha Heifetz), Henryk Wieniawski’s Fantasy on Themes from Gounod’s Faust, Leopold Auer’s arrangement of ‘Lensky’s Aria’ from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin and Fausili’s own version of Violetta’s glittering aria ‘Sempre libera’ from Verdi’s La Traviata.

Faulisi, described by the great Pinchas Zukerman as a violinist ‘with a million dollar sound’, grew up near the Opéra Bastille in Paris and would often queue for autographs at the Stage Door after seeing performances.

‘Opera inhabits an ideal world of myth with its mixture of theatre, poetry, music and magnificent places,’ says the Italian-French-Serbian violinist, whose Sicilian father would serenade the family home with well-known operatic hits.

In addition to popular classics, the album’s rarities include the stunning ‘Roxana’s aria’ from King Roger, an opera from 1924 by the expressionist Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (arranged by Pawel Kochanski). Also included is Efrem Zimbalist’s fantasy on melodies from Rimsky-Korsakov’s fairytale opera Coq d’or.