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Technically Emma Rice’s final original piece of programming at the Globe, ‘Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: A Reimagining’ isn’t some sort of pointed kiss-off but rather an agreeable curio. Put simply, it’s Vivaldi’s timeless violin concerti performed in British-German neoclassicist Max Richter’s much-praised 2012 rearrangement. With puppets. Although the Globe seems eager to pitch it as a theatrical event, I found it easier to rationalise as a concert with nice visuals.
Gyre & Gimble – Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié – are puppet directors at the top of their game. They imbue a series of austere, gender-neutral wooden puppets with remarkable, vivid life. But the story they tell feels vague. A couple meet on a park bench and have a child then, um… I think maybe there’s a war? And possibly a building collapse? The wordless tale is graceful and fluid visually but rather incomprehensible as anything more than a nebulous, cyclical montage of ‘life’.
The music seems more of a focal point here. I’d be lying if I pretended most of my knowledge of the classical canon didn’t come from carpet adverts. But that actually doesn’t stand you in bad stead with ‘The Four Seasons’. And I liked Richter’s more interventionist arrangements – warm drones and sprightly electronics that make Vivaldi’s glittering arpeggios feel more intimate and modern, a tentative, sympathetic bit of iconoclasm. It’s a pretty strange endeavour, but if you like Vivaldi, Richter, puppets or (ideally) all three, there’s definitely something here for you.
This, then, is how the Rice regime ends: not with a bang but with some whimsy.