Brace yourself, music lovers: Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" has come to Greenwich Village. (Le) Poisson Rouge, an ultratrendy nightspot (superfluous parentheses in the original) that bills itself as a "multimedia art cabaret" seeking to "revive the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry," booked a two-night run of classical music's most overplayed masterpiece.
Why? Because "The Four Seasons" has been refurbished by Max Richter, an avant-garde composer of minimalist inclination, and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon by violinist Daniel Hope, who played it earlier this week at (Le) Poisson Rouge. And before you bruise your eyeballs by rolling them, here's the real surprise: "Recomposed by Max Richter," as Mr. Hope's new CD is called, is a bewitchingly brilliant musical hybrid that manages against all odds to breathe life into an exhausted warhorse that a great many listeners—myself included—long ago ceased to find listenable.
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