The brilliance of the National Chamber Ensemble was playing them together in the same concert. Encouraged by his composition teacher in Paris, the famous Nadia Boulanger, Piazzolla originally wrote the work as four separate pieces and later would perform them as a set. Piazzolla’s cellist Jose Bragato beautifully arranged the pieces for violin, cello and piano into one whole and the musicians made clear the link between Vivaldi and Piazzolla by including several sections from Vivaldi’s original piece in the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s best-known work, was composed in the early 1720s, nearly 240 years before tango composer Piazzolla tackled combining classical music with the popular Spanish genre. While the superb keyboard skills of Natasha Dukan, on the piano in the Piazzolla and the keyboard in the Vivaldi, provided the strength and variety of sound that allows a chamber group to perform works generally reserved today for string orchestras, it was the violin and cello played with great passion by cellist Sean Neidlinger in the Piazzolla and the three violins, cello, viola, and bass in the Vivaldi that thrilled with their complementary harmonies, fluid movement among the strings of melodies, and dazzling virtuoso performances of all the musicians. Indeed, Artistic Director Leonid Sushansky, who both directed and carried the concert with his exquisite violin playing, never sat down the entire evening.
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