On 15 July Scottish Ensemble and Jonathan Morton close the 2023 Cheltenham Music Festival with a performance of Anna Meredith’s Anno, her 50-minute re-contextualisation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for violin, strings, harpsichord, and electronics.
The 2016 piece draws on movements omitted from Vivaldi’s original, whilst also editing and re-naming performance directions in his score. Meredith overlays and surrounds this music with her own electronic compositions and soundscapes. Listen to the Scottish Ensemble recording of Anno here.
Anno premiered with video and designs by Eleanor Meredith: a series of sixteen films that explore the concept of experiencing a year within an hour. Scottish Ensemble’s performance at Cheltenham will be similarly immersive, with a foliage installation by Leaf Creative adding to the visual drama. The programme also includes ‘Primavera Porteña’ from Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov for violin and strings, published by Warner Chappell Music and administered for hire by Faber Music outside North America.
In March this year excerpts from Anno were choreographed by Elisabeth Schilling as part of Florescence in Decay at the Grand Théâtre Luxembourg; it also featured in Katie Mitchell’s lockdown project A New Dark Age for the Royal Opera House in 2020. Anno returns to London in the autumn for a performance by Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place on 22 September.
Anno was commissioned by the Scottish Ensemble and Spitalfields Music. Their creation of the piece was captured in a short documentary available to watch online here. It received its US premiere in October 2021 from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Louis Langrée and has also been performed at Glasgow’s Tramway and the Edinburgh International Festival.