Anno Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
Anna Meredith & Eleanor Meredith
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Type: Expo
Stage: Completed -
Anno is Vivaldi's The Four Seasons interspersed with newly written sounds; a year of music, condensed into an hour; a sensory experience of the passing of time; a brand new context for an old, beloved piece.
Commissioned by Spitalfields Music and Scottish Ensemble, Anno is a brand new composition by one of the most inventive composers writing today. Combining and intertwining Vivaldi’s four extremely well-known seasonal concerti, The Four Seasons, with her own new electronic compositions, Anna Meredith has created one continuous, hour-long, fresh experience of the original Baroque masterpiece for string orchestra and electronics.
Stepping into a dark, transformed world, the audience will experience a year in an hour, surrounded by musicians and projections as a circle of powerful sound and light merges, collides, inter-splices and cocoons. The result will be one continuous, hour-long, live experience for the ears and the eyes.
Anna Meredith is one of the most exciting compositional talents in both new classical and electronic music. Straddling the worlds of contemporary classical, avant pop, electronica and experimental rock, her music has been broadcast on Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Whilst her classical accolades include Composer in Residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, RPS/PRS Composer in the House with Sinfonia ViVA, classical music representative for the 2009 South Bank Show Breakthrough Award and winner of the 2010 Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers, she has recently caused ripples of excitement amongst national music press, peers and fans over her debut album,Varmints – released on Moshi Moshi Records on 4 March to instant critical and cult acclaim.
Her works have been performed by leading orchestras and ensembles at an impressive range of events, from the Last Night of the Proms to Latitude Festival, PRADA fashion campaigns and a flash mob performances at motorway service stations.
Eleanor Meredith is an artist and illustrator. She is co-founder and an art director of The Loop, a magazine for curious, creative children aged 8-12. Eleanor also teaches, leads workshops, and works on commissions, with clients ranging from The Skinny Magazine to Sinfonia ViVa to Moshi Moshi Records.
Currently based in Hackney (in a studio hidden at the top of a cinema), she grew up in Scotland, studying Illustration at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art before an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins.
Known for their visceral, energetic performance style, Scottish Ensemble’s performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons adds a distinctive and welcome intimacy to the pieces. As Gramophone magazine said of the 2011 live recording: “The playing standard is excellent, with the strings of Scottish Ensemble finding a light and suitably transparent texture in the Vivaldi, matched by bright, stylish solos from Jonathan Morton…”. Listen to the album on Spotify here.
“Vibrant and Kaleidoscopic in a way few musicians could ever muster, varmints provides a jolt of energy and inspiration to both the pop and classical inflections of Anna Meredith’s Personality, bridging the two worlds like never before and marking her out as a talent like no other.” —
DIY Magazine on Anna Meredith’s Varmints
Music: Vivaldi and Anna Meredith
Live performance: Scottish Ensemble and Anna Meredith
Visuals: Eleanor Meredith
Lighting and environment design: DO Architecture
Co-commissioned by: Scottish Ensemble and Spitalfields Music