For 30 years Vivaldi held the appointment of music master to the Pieta Orphanage in Venice, and most of his compositions were originally written for the well-attended public concerts there. Vivaldi could count on a good orchestra which included every kind of string or wind instrument in use during the early eighteenth century. Like all composers of his time, he had specific performances and individual performers in mind for his works, and if he gave his young ladies difficult instrumental parts, he knew they could play them. The Four Seasons are the first four concertos for strings of Vivaldi’s Op. 8 (published 1725), which bears the poetic subtitle ‘Il cimento dell ‘armonia e dell ‘invenzione’ – the trial between harmony and invention.  Each concerto has a programme of its own based on a sonnet, and words to indicate it appear throughout the score.

©   Stefan de Haan

The tango emerged, violent and passionate, from the bordellos of Buenos Aires. When Astor Piazzolla incorporated jazz elements and classical forms into his ‘Tango Nuevo’, the traditionalists were so outraged that he was subjected to vilification and even, on more than one occasion, death threats. However, by breathing new life into the genre, Piazzolla became the driving force of the worldwide popularity that tango music enjoys today.

Arranged for solo violin and strings by Leonid Desyatnikov, the Cuatro estaciones porteñas (the last word is an adjective referring to ‘port city’, but in this context it means only Buenos Aires!) cover a remarkable range of moods and sounds, tracing a kind of programmatic circuit of the seasons, beginning in the spring and progressing through to winter. The programmatic titles, ‘Buenos Aires spring’ and so on, are general enough to avoid suggesting any specific visual images. The result is purely abstract music, passionate, songful, dark, romantic, rhythmic — imbued with the spirit of everything connoted by the word ‘tango’.

©   anon.

Violin 1
Ruth Rogers
Jessica Coleman
Ann Criscuolo
Nemanja Ljubinkovic
Greta Papa

Violin 2
Gemma Sharples
Clare Hayes
Jeremy Metcalfe
Jayne Spencer

Viola
Ann Beilby
Christopher Beckett
Claire Newton

Cello
Kate Gould
Penny Driver
William Clark-Maxwell

Double Bass
Paul Sherman
Yijia Cui

Ruth Rogers studied with Itzhak Rashkovsky and Herman Krebbers. Described as “the finest of the younger generation of violinists” (Musical Opinion) and hailed by the Guardian as “superb”, Ruth is in demand as soloist, leader, and chamber musician. She was awarded the Tagore Gold Medal – the Royal College of Music’s highest accolade. She appears regularly at such prestigious venues as The Wigmore Hall with Aquinas Piano Trio and has made many recordings as part of that ensemble, including recent releases by Naxos which have been very well received by the critics.

Ruth was appointed as Leader of the London Mozart Players in 2015 and Leader of the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra in 2022. She worked as Co-Leader of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 2008 until 2012 and appears as a guest leader of many other major orchestras including the Hallé, BBC Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Ruth has played to orphans, landmine victims and malaria patients in refugee camps on the Thailand-Burma border.