This crack string ensemble boasts players of a high order, their precision and polished sound very much evident in every aspect of the closing concert of this year’s Cheltenham music festival. Crisscrossing both centuries and continents in a programme with the natural world as its theme, different compositional treatments of the four seasons offered a connecting thread. And, yes, that immediately spells Vivaldi, though not as you’d assume.
It’s common practice for new commissions to be partner pieces to particular pieces in the repertoire, but Anna Meredith’s 2016 piece for the Scottish Ensemble Anno took elements of Vivaldi’s four ultra-familiar concertos and created a sequence of 16 movements, interpolating her own distinctive blend of acoustic and surround electronics. While the original composition featured coordinated visuals by Meredith’s sister Eleanor, here Cheltenham’s Town Hall stage had a back wall of greenery, decorously arranged on the raked seating behind the players, with lighting used to atmospheric effect.
Meredith’s approach is not simply a matter of taking Vivaldi clubbing: it’s playful but not irreverent, occasionally sentimental and, at 55 minutes, somewhat over-indulgent. At its most elemental, the music’s progress from the light of the spring solstice to that of dark winter seemed to connect to the primeval energies associated with those turnings of the year. Among the most striking interventions were the thunder of summer and the glacial wintry chill, where brittle harpsichord combined with electronically generated sounds to colour the aural landscape. Scottish Ensemble leader Jonathan Morton was the vibrant soloist, in sync with Meredith herself presiding over the electronics.
The evening had opened with Astor Piazzolla’s moody Primavera Porteña from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, a neat foil for the following sequence of short pieces. Jessie Montgomery’s lively Starburst was framed by extracts from Caroline Shaw’s Evergreen album, with Joanna Marsh’s In Winter’s House offering a parallel to the final Vivaldi. October from Tchaikovsky’s piano suite The Seasons, arranged for strings by David Matthews, was impeccably played, carrying a wistfulness that contrasted well with the ebb and flow of Fredrik Sjölin’s Shore and the foot-stamping exuberance of a traditional Swedish polska.
