November 14 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts and Entertainment Source: ‘Vivaldi Recomposed’: And reimagined for the Digital Age

Chamber music, classical music’s third branch (after the symphonic and operatic repertoire), is the least-known genre in the classical music universe. And it has the unfortunate reputation of being the ultimate egghead pursuit.

But with a little exposure to it — musicians in groups of two, three, four, five or an orchestra of nearly 20 players — listeners often ndiscover that the fewer number of instruments can yield a sublime and elegant musical message.

Those dividends may come to pass on Friday, when the Bay Area-based New Century Chamber Orchestra performs a program of centuries-old classics in what the orchestra members believe casts a refreshing new light on 17th- and 18th-century sounds, updating them for 21st-century audiences.

The NCOO, as it’s called for short, will kick off its 2024-25 season opener Friday in Vallejo, featuring the first U.S. performance of British composer’s David Bruce’s “Lully Loops,” a fusion of digital and acoustic orchestral sounds, and Max Richter’s popular “Vivaldi: Recomposed — The Four Seasons.” Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s moderato section from “Four Novelletten for String Orchestra” opens the concert.

In an email, Hope, a South African native based in Zurich, Switzerland, said he will lead the 20-member string orchestra, with harpsichord and harp, from the first violin chair or as a soloist.

But the NCCO, like most chamber ensemles, is a fundamentally condcutorless group, configured as “a smaller set-up” but one “even more dynamic than a symphony orchestra,” he said.

Musicians performs standing, “and both the energy and the communication between the players is extraordinary,” said Hope, 51, who earned advanced degrees from the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Richter’s reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s famous four violin concertos is the concert’s marquee piece. By one account, he discarded 75 percent of the original (heard last month at the Empress Theater in a Vallejo Symphony program), but Richter retained the Italian Baroque composer’s melodies, “phased and looped” in a minimalist style.

“Max Richter wrote the piece for me back in 2012 and it has been an incredible journey both in the studio and on stage,” said Hope. “He felt there were certain patterns in the original which resonated with the way in which he composed music. He decided to focus on these and to enlarge their musical radius to build an entirely new piece that is clearly associated to Vivaldi and yet lives its own life.”

Of phased and looped sounds, Hope described them as “the concept of taking certain excerpts out of the music and repeating them in different ways, often adding a baseline underneath, thereby creating a hypnotic but also inspirational feel.”

“Listeners will definitely recognize some of the most beloved moments from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ but they will also experience them as if an old masterpiece has been given not just a dust off but also an entirely new frame,” he added.

Story goes, Richter believed the 1720 piece had lost its impact through overexposure and decided to “salvage” it, and, in the process created a work that has been streamed millions of times, plus used in the hit TV series “The Crown” and “Bridgerton.”

Richter recorded it for the Deutsche Grammophon label in 2012 with Hope on solo violin.

The Coleridge-Taylor piece may strike listeners as modern but also indebted to late 19th-century American and European Romantic-era music.

Hope called it “a rare beauty and a wonderful and unashamedly Romantic sound world.”

Bruce’s “Lully Loops,” using sequences of music from composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, the 17th-century composer in the court of Louis XIV in Versailles, is an equally interesting work. It is a deconstruction and rebuilding of music several centuries old, and a narrator prefaces each of the four movements: “Soul Shards,” “Earworms,” “Vaporwave Loops” and “The Cure for Melancholy.”

“This is an absolutely amazing piece full of drama fun and surprises,” said Hope, who co-commisioned the work with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and performed its world premiere in August 2023.

“The juxtaposition of recorded speech with a life performance from the string orchestra makes for a fascinating setting and the pieces both raucous and exhilarating until the end,” he added. “People should fasten their seatbelts!”

IF YOU GO

• What: New Century Chamber Orchestra: “Vivaldi Recomposed”
• When: 7:30 p.m. Friday
• Where: Empress Theatre, 330 Virginia St., Vallejo
• Tickets: $20 to $45
• Telephone: (707) 552-2400
• Online: empresstheatre.org