Vivace Baroque Orchestra at the Mahaiwe

May 17, 4pm | Great Barrington, MA

Close Encounters With Music brings the Vivace Baroque Orchestra to the Mahaiwe on May 17 for a program pairing Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Piazzolla's Four Seasons of Buenos Aires—two composers separated by two and a half centuries, writing from opposite ends of the world, both obsessed with the same subject.

Vivaldi's concertos, written in Venice in the 1720s, came with sonnets—his own, describing the scenes the music was meant to evoke: a goatherd napping in the shade, a frozen traveler stamping his feet, drunken dancers at harvest time. They're among the earliest examples of what we'd now call program music, and they've survived centuries of overexposure because the music actually does what Vivaldi says it does.

Piazzolla wrote his four pieces in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, not as a suite but as separate works later assembled by the violinist Gidon Kramer into the sequence now performed alongside Vivaldi. They carry the tango rhythms and urban restlessness of mid-century Buenos Aires, and the seasons they describe run counter to the northern calendar.

Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, 14 Castle St., Great Barrington, MA. Tickets $35–$60 at mahaiwe.org. Mahaiwe members receive $5 off.