On September 22, Sunday at Central, Columbus’ nonprofit chamber music organization, presents Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons at the Ohio History Center. Members of the Columbus Symphony will fill the auditorium with the delicious notes that somehow we’ve all completely memorized. It’s hard to pinpoint where you first heard The Four Seasons, but most recently you may have absorbed it while munching on an apple cinnamon crunch scone in your local Panera Bread.
This version of The Four Seasons is a multimedia one involving Jennifer Hambrick reading her seasonally-flavored poetry and Chris as a VJ (video jockey) mixing his visual art pieces on a screen behind the musicians. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears. Vivaldi hailed from the NE corner of Italy as did Marco Ricci, the internationally famous Baroque painter who (fun fact) murdered a Venetian gondolier. The gondolier insulted his artwork, and like a true artist worth his salt, he couldn’t just let that go. So Marco fled the city for some years til things simmered down. It’s easy to imagine that The Four Seasons was penned not only to accompany Vivaldi’s own poetry but also as a musical homage to this fellow colorful Venetian and his landscape paintings.
When approached by Sunday at Central to accompany Four Seasons visually, Chris thought of the thousands of photos piled up in his iCloud account and said Yes! He knew that there were gorgeous landscape shots among them that could be doctored into digital paintings. After creating twelve photo montages, one for each of the movements of the four concerti, he chose different combinations of digital brushes and colors to recreate them in a painterly manner. It sounds oh, so easy. But to select pleasing and not muddy hues, to pace the painting process to match the length of each movement and the varying tempos, to correlate the subject matter with the poetry being read and with the proper season of the year, and to have the end result look appealing and not like something a first grader would slap together were true challenges.
Performing with Jennifer and the Symphony members and sharing his vision of what was going through Vivaldi’s 300-year-old mind is a treat for Chris and mesmerizing visual candy for the audience as well.
