Starting curiously with Autumn, the season of decay, this one long piece morphs into Winter, Spring, Summer and One Year Is Past; a reprise of the opening.
Decay or not, Autumn is heady, evocative, plaintive. Across the forces we build Am9 chords and there is a constant feeling of descending modal melodies - perhaps leaves falling in the breeze. The structure is relieved with short pizzicato arpeggios, harmonics and some triplets. This is perhaps the longest movement but it's also suitably unrushed in its flowing, gentle way.
Winter is rhythmic, and not the chaos I was expecting, but it's still decisive and almost tango-like in its unforgiving rigidity. The choice of Em gives the darkest possible bass notes. Just 16 bars long, the music is effective. The rhythms interlock nicely and a suitably busy soundscape is generated.
Modulating to G7 and thence to C, Spring is born and we move to waltz-time. The principal melody is syncopated over the bar-lines - symbolic perhaps of the erratic and joyful gambolling of new-born lambs. The top part here has a harder time, but there is some helpful fingering (and one or two places where the absence of numbers is right where a systematic fingering falls over).
Summer to me is bright and slow-moving, but we're into G minor with another tango-like beat, but this time with a more slow-weaving and yet rhythmically off-beat countermelody, The darkness of the harmony and the mellowness of the flats seems curiously the opposite of shafts of sunlight, but to be fair, there are some particularly high notes so the soundscape is wide-open.
The reprise is pretty much identical to the opening, save for the final three bars.
It's a charming little piece and the use of seasons to inspire and allow textural, rhythmic and harmonic variations in one single continuous movement is rather nice.
As a single movement piece, the parts are laid out as SATB, so the bulk of the technical challenges fall on Guitar One, the only one that uses 15 frets. The other parts are all first position except for the odd note. The parts are about Grade 4-5 standard, except Guitar One (which will need to be Grade 6-7 if fluency, accuracy and confidence are going to be in sufficient supply).
With the reprise this really is The Five Seasons.
Derek Hasted
