The catalogue number gives you the clue that this represents
Naxos’s first venture into Classical DVD: in some ways a tentative toe
dipped into the murky waters of multimedia, but by no means an ill-considered
one. Eighteen concerto movements each have their own static image displayed
throughout the playing time. This may at first seem like an unadventurous
way to explore the possibilities of marrying image to music afforded
by DVD, but its notable advantage is that it allows those of an imaginative
bent to ‘colour in’ the musical pictorialism which abounds in the Four
Seasons without sacrificing the music at the altar of some misbegotten
nature film (and I’ve seen a few of those: most offensive being a film
of the Lake District peaks with a running loop of the Andante to Mahler
6 in the background). Those who find the imagery distracting are, of
course, free to switch it off.
But forget the pictures for the moment: the disc beguiles
from the start with its principal asset, the sensitive and alert responses
of the London Mozart Players. Their crescendos through the opening ritornello
of Spring’s first movement suggest breaths of fresh air most affectingly
without falling into the trap of affected. Although this is ostensibly
Juritz’s interpretation, the Players’ high degree of collective virtuosity
and intelligence seems to shape the music unobtrusively. Leader Yuri
Zhislin and first cello Sebastian Comberti are acknowledged soloists
in their own right: quite properly, the orchestral members are listed
in the notes – with one exception. Lively but largely uncontroversial
tempos and some quirky articulation betray an awareness of Baroque performing
practice without slavish devotion to its precepts: no ugly swells mid-note
or ‘excitingly’ rough tone here.
David Juritz ornaments tastefully and extensively in
slow movements: that of Spring has at least three times the number of
notes than those in the score. He’s unafraid to pull the tempo around
when he thinks he can get away with it: the gathering clouds of Summer’s
first movement lour most effectively. You might reasonably raise an
eyebrow at the stop-start way that soloist and conductor trip over each
other among the haystacks in the first movement of Autumn, but there’s
a hale and hearty, girls-and-boys-come-out-to-play feeling that’s easily
enjoyable. Juritz steps courteously aside in that concerto’s second
movement to allow the excellent and sadly anonymous harpsichordist his
moment of glory. Here the rain-spattered leaves on screen make a moving
juxtaposition to the slow, insistent drip of arpeggio figurations.
By this stage, however, I was quite glad of a break
from Juritz. What at the outset was pleasure taken from his unexaggerated
playing gradually turned into an impatience with him to vary his tone
colours. Too much of the solo playing on the disc has a forthrightness
that palls after a while. He is rhythmically four-square in the Danza
Pastorale finale of Spring where his colleagues catch the music’s lilt
beautifully. The pinsharp focus of the recording not only constantly
exposes traffic noise in the Four Seasons’ last three concertos but
also catches Juritz technically slack at various points: staccato runs
in the finale of Summer, a loss of bow control at the end of a long-held
note in the fist movement of Autumn. I emphasise that these faults would
hardly matter did not the recording expose them so mercilessly.
The two bonus concertos are just that, really. Endless
1-4-5 progressions in the first movement of the D major hardly set the
pulse racing regardless of the acoustic marvel of two orchestras (the
concertos’ unusual scoring) in surround sound. Here too the images lose
the plot, falling back on religiose evocations of gloomy cloisters and
over-exposed, unfocused snaps of altarpieces. A pity, because this DVD
is well worth its minimal outlay for the Four Seasons alone.
Peter Quantrill
David Juritz (violin and director)