“We hear everywhere-when you’re on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising it’s everywhere,” Richter told NPR. Framing his project as a “conversation” with Vivaldi rather than another re-recording, he threw out three quarters of the original material, kept what he liked best, rewrote the score, and used looping techniques to make these staid sounds seem unfamiliar and new again. Richter’s version of The Four Seasons bears the mark of much of the London composer’s work, which brings certain postmodern values to the canon.
His “Spring 1” is frequently synced on television: It has appeared as a wonderfully deployed leitmotif in the HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend soundtracking the horny, Regency-era melodramas of Bridgerton and loop-de-looping around shots of avant-garde meals in Chef’s Table. The Four Seasons has been recorded hundreds if not thousands of times, and a 2012 “recomposition” by Max Richter is among the most widespread. Diddy apparently has called “Spring” his theme music.
As Alex Ross argued in The New Yorker, we now think of Vivaldi as “the Muzak of the middle classes, the backbeat of the bourgeois bustle.” This reputation mostly stems from The Four Seasons, which is ubiquitous beyond belief: The opening notes of “Spring” float above wedding processions, year after year the swells of “Summer” and the tumult of “Winter” have been perennial favorites of ad breaks and movie soundtracks for nearly a century. The Four Seasons is among the most famous pieces of music in the history of Western culture, beloved and derided in equal measure-like any omnipresent work of pop.
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