Cast
Program notes
Singaporean violin virtuoso Chloe Chua, who burst onto the scene at age 11 at the prestigious Menuhin Competition in 2018, joins forces with the sensational Singapore Symphony Orchestra in an evergreen program, featuring Vivaldi’s year-in, year-out favorite Four Seasons, plus Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in D Major, "The Harmonic Labyrinth"!
Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, published in 1725, are the best known of the Baroque composer’s works—and some of the earliest examples of program music, as the concertos were published alongside a set of short seasonal sonnets. Upon their initial publication as part of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, the pieces were seen as rather avant-garde, leading to a mixed reception and a certain amount of controversy. After two centuries of obscurity, the Four Seasons began to find renewed favor in the 1950s, and decades later there are hundreds of different recordings of the set, including Chloe Chua’s dazzling album, released in 2023 when she was just 16! Italian Baroque composer Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in D Major perfectly complements Vivaldi’s iconic work. The final masterpiece of Locatelli’s set of twelve concertos titled L’arte del violino, this "Harmonic Labyrinth" is infamous for its exceptionally difficult capricci, described by the composer as "easy to enter, difficult to escape!"
