A revelatory 'Four Seasons': ISO and two fully invested guests see Vivaldi from the ground up

Francis Fullana caught the seasonal spirit.

"The Four Seasons," a landmark in the solo concerto genre, the earliest of its type to still be in the mainstream 300 years after its premiere, occupied the main position in this weekend's Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra schedule.

I heard the final offering of 2025 in the Classical Series Sunday afternoon as the orchestra departed from its Friday norm because of Halloween. It was the best kind of matinee concert: ingratiating, vivid, and celebratory of waning daylight hours upon the return of standard time. Hilbert Circle Theatre felt amply inviting even without the holiday decorations soon to come. 

Jeannette Sorrell was the copacetic host, a conductor-harpsichordist fully versed in Baroque repertoire.

Jeannette Sorrell, conductor

She was a charming guide to Antonio Vivaldi's four picturesque violin concertos, introducing each one with the orchestra's help in presenting brief illustrations of the Italian composer's tone-painting genius. With electrifying elan, the solo role was taken up by a sympathetic partner, Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana.

The significance of this familiar music was weighted toward a salute to the life of the contadini, the Italian peasant class of the 18th century. The feeling of pastoral connection with the natural cycle was uppermost in this interpretation. 

Projections on the lowered screen above the musicians, designed by Camilla Tassi and focusing on paintings of peasant life (such as "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder), kept the contadini on view. True, those depicted were their Northern counterparts with rather more snow than the freezing rain Vivaldi depicts in "Winter," but the social status and work life were similar 'round the calendar.

There was nothing rough-hewn about the performance, however. It was just idiomatically unbuttoned, with such details as a vast sweep into the second phrase of "Autumn"'s first movement to render the harvest dance or, in "Summer," making the barking dogs represented by the violas extra loud: these were not pampered pups vocalizing demurely into their paws. Modern instruments can play this music with proper, illuminating style if well directed. The phrasing Sorrell drew from the ISO was a relief in comparison with the soupy wash of strings readily encountered in 20th-century "Four Seasons" recordings. 

"The Harvesters" reflects social class of "Four Seasons" 

Key to conveying this robust approach was Fullana's performance, imaginative and often playful, as in the dance finale of  "Spring." An advocate of gut strings and using what appeared to be a pre-Tourte bow, subtly convex near the tip, Fullana commanded a subtle palette of tone color to which skill with ornamentation was frequently applied. His poignant side got a touching outing as the "hunt" finale  of "Autumn" concluded with the exhausted fox, a reminder of Oscar Wilde's withering description of the fox hunt: "the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable."

Sorrell's sensitivity to performance practice of the time, and of such Vivaldi predecessors as Marin Marais and Marco Uccellini, whom the program represented before "The Four Seasons," was confirmed by her guest accompanists: Anna O'Connell (Baroque harp) and William Simms (lute and theorbo). ISO principal cellist Austin Huntington dispatched well his extra duties leading the continuo role. And In the "Tempest" movement of Marais' "Alcyone" suite, a couple of ISO percussionists were brought into play with a thunder sheet and a hand-cranked wind machine.

The program finale put another ISO member into the spotlight. Standing beside Fullana and lending sufficient energy and bright articulation to the second violin solo part was concertmaster Kevin Lin. The vehicle was Sorrell's arrangement of "La Folia," a hit tune crisply rendered as "madness" in English. The short theme settles into a groove that made it the "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" of its era — only more popular. This performance was a right rave-up, as British disc jockeys used to say, and the excitement of its variations guaranteed a shouting ovation from the matinee audience.