Fullana’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Carlos Iczaray lacks the last bit of punch and zip and enthusiasm one would wish an orchestra would bring to this work. The Deutsche Grammophone recording renders the Berlin Konzerthaus Chamber Orchestra in an acoustic with more boom more effectively bringing out the bass instruments while also affording the soloist a little more clarity. Fullana’s performance is very good and easily on par with Hope’s slower than Hope in some key moments (which generally fits the atmosphere) and makes an ad-libitum (?) cut to the pulsating end of “Summer”. Instead he created the piece from scratch, stripped Vivaldi bare, re-forged it, and wrote it out.ĭaniel Hope helped it to great start but now Four Seasons Recomposed getting a life beyond Hope. Richter didn’t just re-mix extant recordings into pseudo-hip newishness, as DG’s “Re-Composed” series has done before.
His Vivaldi-goes-clubbing approach works extraordinarily well and it works best in “Spring” and “Summer” where Richter opens whole new avenues and sightlines of beauty, calm and distant – dotted with moments of wicked otherness and clever minimalist loops. He has composed ballets for the Royal Opera House as well as collections of ringtones. Richter is a genre-defying British composer fond of employing electronic elements.
Improving isn’t really possible, so something new must be created off the old substance – and that is exactly what Max Richter’s re-composition manages. To paraphrase my earlier review: No one needs a mock-original or likeness of the Four Seasons. In doing so Fullana not only offers an alternative reading, which is something we should want to have of all worthy compositions, but he also presents this inspired 21 st century Vivaldi-knock-off in a new setting by interpolating the four concertos with three 20 th century violin (solo and solo + piano) bonbons. Francisco Fullana is, to my knowledge, the first violinist to record Max Richter’s ingenious Four Seasons Recomposed since the initial outing with Daniel Hope on Deutsche Grammphon (among my favorite recordings of 2012).
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