(KEYBOARDS)
We rockers love to show off.
Flamboyance is in our blood.
But the idea of the crowd-pleasing frontman
is older than you might think.
Starting well before I played in '70s supergroups,
even before Elvis swivelled a hip.
That's because I believe the founding father of modern rock
lived nearly 300 years ago.
And there is a very good chance
that you've got his most famous album in your pocket.
RINGTONE: # The Four Seasons Excuse me.
Hello.
That music is The Four Seasons
and the genius who wrote it was Antonio Vivaldi.
Composer of a masterpiece truly avant garde in its day,
one that is still the most recorded classical work ever.
You can feel the power of certain compositions.
This one is phenomenonally powerful.
He was also a violinist of such exceptional talent
that he became the biggest star Europe had known.
I think of him like Hendrix, visionary
and a great instrumentalist.
I'd have him in the band.
He's in our band first. I booked him first.
So why after becoming such a phenomenon
did Vivaldi and his music virtually disappear
for almost 200 years after he died?
The answers lie at the heart of one of Europe's great musical cities.
Here I'll turn detective
to discover how this 18th-century priest
became THE trailblazing god of rock,
writer of the ultimate concept album.
I've never even seen some of these instruments before.
I'm travelling back in time to discover the truth behind Vivaldi
and the mystery of The Four Seasons.
# VIVALDI: The Four Seasons
You may not know this about me
but before I was a Grumpy Old Man,
before Yes, huge stadium tours
and multi-platinum selling solo albums,
I was just a long-haired teenager studying here
at the Royal College of Music in London.
Back then, I was never allowed to play on this stage.
That was just a dream.
Like my hope that one day
before I ran away to become a rocker that is,
I would write music that would become timeless.
Classic.
And I'd play in a way that had fans on their feet clamouring for more.
Basically I wanted to follow in Vivaldi's footsteps.
I'd like to read you a quote.
It was written in 1715 by Zacharias von Uffenbach,
a German traveller and scholar
who had just been to see a concert in one of the many theatres in Venice.
He wrote, "Towards the end, Vivaldi
played a solo accompaniment admirably,
adding at the end a free fantasy which quite frightened me
for it is scarcely possible that anyone
ever played or will play in this way,
for he placed his fingers but a hair's breadth from the bridge
so that there was barely room for the bow,
doing all this on four strings
with imitations and incredible speed."
Uffenbach had just seen the first-ever rock star
doing what few other musicians would do
for many hundreds of years to come.
He'd just witnessed and heard the incredible genius
of Antonio Vivaldi,
writer of the great Baroque classic
The Four Seasons.
Written in 1723,
it's still the most recorded classical piece of all time.
One that is now so impossible to escape,
that it's become loved and loathed
in equal measure.
But to dismiss it
is to ignore just how revolutionary this masterpiece is.
Because it helped to define the modern concerta
and was at the forefront of a truly radical idea
that music could tell the listener a story
without the use of words.
But don't just take it from me.
I'm off to ask someone who plays it,
one of our most gifted and in-demand young violinists,
the Scottish virtuoso Nicola Benedetti.
I think they are one of the greatest works of art
of our entire body of classical music.
I don't even have any time
for cynicism towards these four concertos.
That the core subject of every single movement
is something that is so definitive, so strong, so loveable.
What I think is a work of art with it is the fact
that there is a severe degree of difficulty...
in the playing.
But to a listener it doesn't sound like that all the time.
It is extremely challenging.
A violinist wants to be challenged,
we want to be able to play something that's hard
and you can really get your teeth stuck into.
An audience also wants to see you go through that.
They want to see you tackle these things, overcome them
and get to the end of something impossible
and at the end of the Summer Concerto,
everyone is almost like, "Oh, wow."
He was an amazing player himself. A phenomenal player.
He had to be to write this.
I've always considered it a wonderful showing-off piece.
Oh, it is.
There's absolutely no question about that. In the Summer Concerto
which is,
this place is the first kind of...
..really consistent fast...
especially with the right hand,
fast playing that you hear.
You're playing this suddenly very fiery virtuosic playing.
And throughout the Summer Concerto, the whole thing is like...
By the end of it your arms... It's flat out.
I always before the Autumn Concerto,
I'm almost just like somehow trying to create an excuse
to give myself just five minutes
to let my right arm just come down.
There is no turning back, there's no respite,
or any little stepping stone to rest on for a couple of minutes.
Exactly.
It must be pretty exciting for audiences. I'm sure.
And Vivaldi being the wild personality that he was
I'm sure
reacted to that hugely and played up to it
and tried to manipulate it and saw it as a challenge.
Just think of the mastery of this
and just the level of complications
in being able to write something like this. Just phenomenal.
He really became a household name.
And I can only imagine what... the impact it had
on the people that were there and then.
All of this begs the question
if Vivaldi was the superstar of his day,
an adored genius,
who wrote the 18th-century's biggest hit
why did he and his masterwork largely disappear after he died?
To solve these mysteries
I have to travel back to where it all began.
To a city that was once one of the most debauched on the planet.
Well, where else would you expect to find a rock god?
Venice is one of the most beautiful and bizarre cities in the world.
Built completely on stilts in the middle of a lagoon,
and sinking slowly but surely,
year after year.
It's been a tourist mecca for centuries.
But though you could take home anything from a carnival mask
to a miniature gondola,
the one thing you can't buy
is an image of Venice's most famous son.
So much of Vivaldi's story is still shrouded in myth and legend
and what little we do know
is still the subject of much conjecture and debate.
In fact, the experts can't even seem to agree on what he looked like.
We do know he had flaming red hair
earning him the nickname "Il Prete Rosso".
"The Red Priest."
But the best known and most reproduced image of him
is dismissed by most experts
as probably not him at all.
We know this engraving is him.
It was supposedly made for an early published version
of The Four Seasons.
But the best likeness is this one.
Done by a caricature artist.
You like it? Yeah.
It's very clever.
Then again they can make you look like anyone, can't they?
Wow. What we definitely do know about Antonio Lucia Vivaldi
is that he was born on March 4th, 1678,
here in Bragora in an unknown house
somewhere on this square.
Legend has it
that his birth coincided with an earthquake
although no record of one has ever been found.
Born prematurely, allegedly
just seven months after his parents' marriage... (CLEARS THROAT)
he was immediately baptised by a midwife
for fear he might die.
We know this thanks to a rare and important document
discovered just 50-odd years ago
in the nearby church.
The current parish priest
Don Giovanni
has agreed to show it to me.
(SPEAKS ITALIAN)
I just think how wonderful it is that things survive
centuries and centuries.
And at the time the person who wrote that in that book
would have absolutely no idea
what an important document that would turn out to be...
..so many hundreds of years later.
That is really quite special.
I just think it's fantastic. I love looking at things like that.
That is just amazing. I have to ask you,
do you like Vivaldi's music?
There is no official monument to Vivaldi anywhere in Venice
but here in this little church
I stumbled across one admirer who has created her own special tribute.
Brigitte Tireque fell in love with Vivaldi
during a holiday in Venice.
She moved here nine years ago
and now makes a daily pilgrimage
to worship at her shrine.
What was it you loved about Vivaldi?
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
The flowers came first? You brought flowers first? Yes.
And then the bust you had, yeah?
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
Oh, from the caricature, yes.
I think it's lovely what you do.
It's fantastic.
It's important.
Music, composers and music
need people like you.
You must be a very wealthy lady
to be able to bring all these flowers and do the bust.
(LAUGHS)
Oh.
Well, I hope the florist gives you a very good deal.
To her, and in fact to a lot of people,
he's still alive.
If somebody's music still lives, then to some extent
they are still living as well.
And the mere fact she cares that much to do it
that pleases many thousands of people who come to see the church as well
I think it's pretty amazing.
Can't imagine anyone doing that for me.
The church would turn out to play a vital role
in the making of Antonio Vivaldi.
But it was his father who first nurtured his talent.
A barber turned violinist in the orchestra of St Mark's Cathedral,
he eventually gave it up to manage his son
who by his teens
was already a master of both the violin and the harpsichord.
But in the 18th century
musicians were just jobbing tradesmen not high-earning celebrities.
So at 15,
young Antonio joined the priesthood.
After a decade's training
he was ordained in 1703.
But within a year, asked to be excused from saying mass,
blaming the illness which had dogged him from birth.
(SPEAKS ITALIAN)
Far from being reprimanded
he was allowed to continue as a priest.
Vivaldi was lucky
to live at a time and in a place
where the Church was willing to indulge his true calling.
When Vivaldi lived and worked in Venice,
it truly was THE musical centre of Europe.
In the 18th century it was awash with the stuff.
Nietzsche the philosopher was once know to have commented,
"When I search for a word to replace that of music,
I can think only of Venice."
Back then, gondoliers sang as they cruised the canals.
There was daily singing in churches
and music was celebrated in concerts both public and private.
The musical fashion was for experimentation
creating a need for completely new instruments.
I've never even seen some of these instruments before.
This is my sweet shop.
This is... Oh, wow, look at that.
That is a work of art as well. Look at that.
(CHUCKLES)
(PLAYS)
I want one.
This is an education.
They say that music is the world's longest apprenticeship course.
Oh, is that true. At 65 I'm still learning.
Whilst still a priest,
Vivaldi was now free to pursue his musical dream
as both ambitious composer
and star violinist.
His playing was so exceptional
the one guide book of the time
even listed him as the must-see attraction in Venice.
And it wasn't long before this extraordinary talent
brought him a new job offer, one that would change his life
and music forever.
To find out more,
I've come to meet another woman who fell in love with Vivaldi.
For almost 20 years, Micky White worked as a Wimbledon photographer.
Now she lives in Venice
investigating Vivaldi's association with a truly amazing institution.
When he was 25 just after he'd been ordained,
he went to the Pieta
to be the violin teacher.
What exactly was the Pieta?
The Pieta was an institution
for abandoned children.
The majority of children
that were left, were due to prostitution.
So before the Pieta,
what would have happened to these children?
Chucked in the canal.
Oh, you're joking. No.
You see, the Pieta was founded by a Franciscan.
Who was so appalled at seeing babies floating in the canal
that he founded a home for abandoned children.
It was one of the four institutions set up by the state
and all these ospedali did music.
They all had their own musicians.
But the interesting thing was
that it was only the women that did music.
The men did not do music.
They would perform
primarily for the church.
Then they would do concerts in the music room
for visiting nobles
from Italy
and Europe.
We know that some of these girls were very fine players.
How good actually were they? I think they were exceptional.
And in fact, the Pieta got a reputation
for being the best ospedale for music in Venice.
But those who came expecting to be close up and personal
with a bevy of beautiful players were often disappointed.
The audience were only ever treated to a tantalising glimpse
of these young virtuosos.
That's because, when they performed,
they were hidden behind grilles very similar to the ones here.
It's also likely that they would be very modestly dressed
in probably black and white with veils covering their hair.
What a tease.
In fact,
far from being the nubile young group of folklore,
the women of the orchestra ranged in age from 11 to 75
many staying on to play music at the Pieta their entire lives.
The space they played in wasn't huge.
Just imagine 30 to 40 of those women,
players and singers all crammed onto a balcony
often smaller than this.
And playing alongside them their fiery-red-haired maestro
pushing his violin to the limit.
And encouraging them to improvise and perform free-form solos
just like he did.
He was an unusual person.
I think the first thing that would come into mind
would be "wild guy".
He knew how to entertain.
One visitor went to this concert
which was in a church
and "Don Antonio Vivaldi, famous composer and player,
was prevailed upon to play during vespers
in the above-mentioned church,
which was so packed with people
that scuffles broke out."
In fact it says, (SPEAKS ITALIAN).
They fainted.
How would you compare that with things that have happened
in the 20th century and 21st century?
With popular music and rock bands.
It's the same.
See, I think he started it.
Absolutely.
Vivaldi mania. Vivaldi mania, I like that.
Vivaldi's talent and flair would bring him enormous fame and success.
But his rebellious streak would also attract enemies
and sow the seeds of his eventual destruction.
By the early 1700s
Vivaldi was filling Venice with exciting new music
creating not just instrumental pieces but dozens of operas, oratorios
and sacred works, too.
He was writing two concertos a month for his all-girl band
and beginning to find his true calling as a composer.
Having a private orchestra with which to experiment
enabled him to develop a unique and challenging style
one that would go on
to change the face of music.
Isn't it lovely how great composers of the day like Vivaldi
helped young musicians come through.
For example, 9:00pm tonight,
Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, and the support act, W A Mozart.
Doesn't get any better than that, does it?
Vivaldi's revolutionary vision was that the music itself
should tell a story.
The players would paint pictures with their instruments
and the listeners could follow them like a plot.
This reached its peak with a masterwork
written when he was 45
and at the height of his creative powers.
It features 12 concertos
he grandly named, "The contest between harmony and invention."
Four of them tower above the others.
We know them of course
as The Four Seasons.
Hello, lovely to see you. Lovely to see you.
Come on over.
To find out more about what inspired
the most famous of his 500 or so concertos,
I've come to the Venice Conservatoire
to meet musician and Vivaldi scholar Susan Orlando.
He lived in the city here in Venice.
What would he know about the countryside and the seasons?
What is certain is that he went and worked in the court in Mantua
a few years before The Four Seasons was published.
And if you think about him coming from Venice
where there are very few trees, if any,
there is no grass,
you don't hear the lovely twitter of birds in Venice very much.
And so there might be an argument
that The Four Seasons was an inspiration
that came to him
when he spent this time in Mantua.
It's something that the listener
can immediately latch onto. It's something that they can work with
to form their own pictures.
I think it's part of... the secret of Vivaldi
and why his music works so well
is that somehow Vivaldi knew how...
He had the keys to writing a kind of music
that speaks immediately to the listener,
it touches your emotion immediately.
And you can then listen to it millions of times
and you never get tired of it.
I've often told this story. Twice I've had people at my house.
Once was an electrician and another time a plumber or something.
Where they were working away.
In the background Vivaldi's music was playing.
And two separate times these people came to me and said,
"Lady, I don't listen to classical music, but this stuff is great."
I'd like to think that he knew how good he was.
I'm sure he knew how good he was.
I have no doubt that he knew exactly how good he was.
That, as you said to me earlier,
in a way, Vivaldi was a kind of a rock star.
Because he played in such an exceptional way,
very extravagant.
He would have been conducting from his violin as well.
So he could really show off, move around
and improvise all his cadences.
And this meant that people started talking about him
and created a star.
But for someone as famous as Vivaldi,
18th-century Venice wasn't always an easy or safe place to be.
The city was a hotbed of intrigue and innuendo
and her citizens were well aware that the state kept its eye on them.
Along every canal,
around every corner loitered an army of spies and informants,
eager to report any salacious titbit.
Especially about celebrities.
In a strange way, I know what it feels like to be spied on.
It's not very nice. Sometimes it's your fault.
I was spied on between marriages by the press and the media
which I suppose is fine. It's their job, it's what they do.
But it is a very, very weird feeling
to know, that even if you are innocent on something,
every corner you go round there's likely to be somebody there
either pouncing out to ask you a question or accuse you of something.
But back then it must have been really horrendous
cos it was the authorities that did the spying.
And pretty nasty if you got caught.
The cause of Vivaldi's problems was inevitably for a rock star
the whiff of a sex scandal.
Some rumourmongers now began questioning
how the Red Priest could possibly resist his talented young charges.
When he was 58 during a trip to Mantua,
Vivaldi met a talented young singer named Anna Giro
some 40-odd years his junior.
She quickly became something of a muse and travelling companion.
And if the gossip is to be believed, a hell of a lot more.
Vivaldi adamantly denied wrongdoing
claiming Anna was merely his prodigy
and a help to a sick man.
But I'm off to meet someone
who presents an altogether different picture.
For 60 years, Dr Virgilio Boccardi
has lived on the very square where Vivaldi was born.
An award-winning journalist, writer and film maker,
he wrote a book outlining his investigation into the Red Priest.
(SPEAKS ITALIAN)
So was he...
a happy man in himself, do you think?
And as through much of his life,
money would soon become a serious problem.
Vivaldi had enjoyed almost 40 years on and off at the Pieta
while travelling around Europe.
But by the mid 1730s
his bosses had tired of his frequent absences
and seeing the decline of their once-great orchestra,
they cut the Red Priest loose for good.
Suddenly, the star once feted by cardinals and kings,
was in dire financial straits.
Nobody really knows why for sure
but in 1740, it seems that Vivaldi decided to start afresh.
He left this house on the Grand Canal,
his last-known residence in Venice,
to travel to Vienna,
possibly in search of a new patron.
But once there, the prince that he had pinned some of his hopes on
died
and work never materialised.
A year later,
he was dead, aged 63,
of an unknown illness recorded simply as an internal inflammation.
With little more ceremony than a peal of bells,
he was buried in obscurity
in Vienna's Hospital Cemetery.
Almost immediately,
Vivaldi and his work disappeared.
His revolutionary music was out of fashion
overshadowed by a trend for a new and much simpler style.
I can sympathise.
It must have been the 18th-century equivalent
of punk sweeping away prog rock.
But it was worse for Vivaldi.
There was no recording industry to keep his music alive
and often there would be only one hand-written copy
of the piece of music.
Which perhaps explains why there is no complete original manuscript
of The Four Seasons in existence.
There is one copy in the world.
But it isn't, as you might expect, in Italy.
In fact, it's right under our noses
here in the UK.
Hidden deep in the vaults of Manchester Central Library.
Roz Edwards, the curator of the music collection,
has agreed to show me.
Ooh.
Gosh, this is... This is absolutely brilliant.
So, how much of The Four Seasons have you got?
We've got all four parts of all four of the concertos.
Have you really? Yes.
That is Spring.
It's been beautifully copied out.
It has, hasn't it?
It would have been written by a copyist.
Because it's so neat and tidy,
we think it was written
for a special commission.
How would this compare
to what we know as The Four Seasons today?
It's similar in most cases
but there are one or two passages that are different.
What really makes these concertos unique
is that each season features a set of instructions
in the form of sonnets,
likely to have been written by Vivaldi himself.
The sonnets were sort of indicating
what the music was about.
For both the player and the audience.
So in their mind, the listener would know...
Because they could follow the music through via the poem.
Some of what he wrote was very specific to the text of the music.
So he'll have written, "Dogs are barking."
"Thunder and lightning."
But he also wrote sort of lines that indicated some sort of mood
like "soporific summer heat."
It really was a concept album.
Yes. Well, without the recording.
Yes.
Had never been done before. No, not to my knowledge.
it just shows what is possibly still out there, doesn't it?
Yes. I'm gonna go to every car boot sale this year.
And buy every piece of music I can find.
This is astonishing.
Seeing these books is a revelation,
because they've confirmed for me something I've long suspected.
The Four Seasons isn't just a work of genius.
It's also a blueprint for the kind of music I play.
Seeing this evokes so many things.
The fact that it's 300 years old.
I've always said there's a great connection
between the Baroque period and shall we say
the '70s in particular,
the late '60s and the '70s
in modern-day rock music or popular music.
Because it has that same formula.
It's complicated but sounds simple.
And there is an art to playing it.
And I can't help but think the guy who maybe did these pages indeed
sort of written them out and gone home to his missus...
"What did you do today, dear?"
"Oh, I copied some Vivaldi parts.
It's all right, he's playing it next Sunday."
How wonderful is that?
I'm now more convinced than ever
that The Four Seasons really was the first concept album.
But what do my fellow rockers think?
I've come to test my theory on a pioneer of the form,
one of the founders of prog super band Genesis.
The guitarist Mike Rutherford.
What would you consider
the definition of a concept album really to be?
I suppose an album
where musical freedom was required
and a story really.
Has to have a start, a middle, a finish, an end, and a purpose.
And the purpose and the story would be
to help the musician or to help the listener or...both?
Kind of both really.
Almost more to make the body work, get across to the audience.
You need words to tell the story, the music to follow the words.
It's a great platform to work from because you're free in between.
That's how I felt it with us, in my case, Genesis.
It was just a kind of freedom.
It was a chance to write whatever the hell you wanted.
It's the way to present drama.
Cos songs, pop songs and hit songs are a certain sort of thing,
but the longer pieces
you can, as you did yourself, you can create a drama
and a mood and atmosphere.
If you made a list of the great concept albums,
would you say that The Four Seasons would actually slot in
and go, "Yeah, that comes under that category"?
Yeah, 100%. It's a fabulous concept, idea. It's so simple, isn't it?
It's a simple idea, something that people can recognise. Great tunes.
You should be able to just sort of...
say one sentence
and everyone gets what it's all about.
In this case, the title tells you.
You're suddenly drawn in.
Before you even hear the music you imagine things visually.
Would you like to think
that maybe in 200 years' time...
..that the concepts you put together with Genesis,
would you like to think that they could happily sit alongside
stuff like Vivaldi's Four Seasons?
Good question. Wonderful thought.
I think he'd have been an interesting character.
I'd have him in the band.
He's in our band first. I booked him first.
But still there are questions to be answered.
How did this prototype rock finally dig its way out of obscurity?
And once rediscovered,
what was it about The Four Seasons
that made it the classic we now all know and love?
It might be impossible to believe now
but until the late 1920s,
Antonio Vivaldi was virtually unheard of.
Known really only for the influence he had on other composers like Bach.
What really put him and The Four Seasons back on the musical map
was the birth of the recording industry.
The arrival of the LP in the 1940s
meant that millions of people everywhere around the world
could hear this exciting new music for the very first time.
This was largely thanks not to a European
but to an American violinist and concert master
more known for his work in Hollywood.
Louis Kaufman played solo violin
on close to 500 iconic movie soundtracks
including Gone With The Wind.
His 1947 album of The Four Seasons
kickstarted the modern Vivaldi revival
spawning over 1,000 different recordings.
But it was Nigel Kennedy's version in 1989
that propelled Vivaldi into the charts
thanks to the full pop marketing treatment.
..one of the biggest-selling classical albums of all time...
With anything this popular
comes the inevitable backlash.
And that has left lovers of The Four Seasons
searching for ways to put a new spin on it.
I'm off to meet one of them.
Max Richter is a genre-hopping British composer
who has given the Seasons a 21st-century makeover.
Complete with its own app.
I had this weird experience of like
falling in love with this music when I was a kid
and then as I sort of got older
I just became aware of hearing it all the time.
But on telly, on jingles, adverts.
In the shopping centre.
I started to kind of hate it.
So really I just sort of set out on this journey
to try and rediscover the original.
And just starting to kind of...
try to encounter it...afresh.
So what is it you've actually done with The Four Seasons then?
In a way it's like a remix, but not made in the computer or studio.
It's a remix of the actual dots on the page.
Done with a pencil.
It's almost like a co-write.
It's a collaborative project
except I've only got the score.
I haven't got him on the phone or sitting in the studio.
One of the things that drew me to Vivaldi
was the fact that I felt there was a natural overlap
between what I naturally do and Vivaldi's music.
Cos actually in a way, Vivaldi's music was very modern.
It looks very contemporary on the page weirdly enough.
His music is really modular, chunky.
It's sort of pattern music.
Those of us who work with computers in recording
are very familiar with this idea, that way of structuring music.
Dance music is all made like that. Electronic music mostly.
So I felt there was a sympathy there anyway.
So if...
if he were alive today
what do you think he would say?
The first person to rework The Four Seasons was him.
Him? He repurposed it
and mashed it up for all sorts of other things.
And composers have always done that.
That is part of what composers do.
Yeah. I don't think he would have a problem with it actually.
I think he would be like, really fine.
In fact, I think Vivaldi would positively love it,
that almost 300 years after his death,
his music lives on.
Not just in its more traditional form
but in ways he surely could never have imagined.
Back on the outskirts of Venice
I've come to meet Croatian musician Mistheria,
founder of a global gathering of players and arrangers
who go by the name of the Vivaldi Metal Project.
What sort of gave you the idea
that you could actually do a metal version of the music?
I think Vivaldi
worked most of his music under The Four Seasons
with the same approach as today metal music.
He was a real rock star.
And not just because he was normal,
but because his music was really rock.
In the way he keeps a rhythm going.
He was always searching for the best melodies.
And understandable, harmonies.
I agree.
I think that his audiences, for the first time,
we would have audiences sitting, going...
Yeah, that's the way.
For the first time.
Which is not dissimilar to as we have with metal.
It's exaggerated the same way.
I'm guessing you haven't taken Vivaldi's music note for note?
My idea was not to do it notes by notes.
But I want to keep the energy of the Vivaldi music.
What we are trying to avoid of course, violins.
Doing what is in the original because I could not do better...
Absolutely.
So it's useless.
I started to work on the summer
and especially the third movement.
I started with drums
and some guitar that I named Inferno.
(GUITAR ROCK)
Yeah.
Antonio would be proud of you.
OK. I hope so.
I want to give also some epicness
so I add
some choir...
(CHOIR VOCALISES)
(PIANO)
That really is good.
I'm more and more convinced,
the more I'm on this journey of Vivaldi and The Four Seasons
that this is the route
that he would have taken. Wow.
I'm now even more convinced.
So he was a metal guy?
Maybe...
Maybe in his own way he was.
(HEAVY METAL/CLASSICAL)
More than anything, what I've come to realise
is that just like the music I write,
The Four Seasons was all about making people feel good.
And Vivaldi was the first great frontman,
an 18th-century rock god.
In fact, the more I've learned about the Red Priest,
the more I know I owe him a huge debt of musical gratitude.
And so I'm going to show my appreciation
in the best way I know how.
By performing, ladies and gentlemen,
a prog rock version of the main themes
from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
subtitles by Deluxe
Sorry, Antonio.