New Year's Eve Concert | Four Seasons & Songs from Gondola

Buon anno! For at least three hundred years, Venice has played the role of a synonym for carnival in our imagination. Since Casanova's time, the myth of the city built on the blue lagoon has endured, even though its final decline was already underway. Join us at NFM, where music, including gondoliers' songs and Antonio Vivaldi's “Four Seasons”, will transport us to an era of decadent revelry. The mastery of the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra, led by Jarosław Thiel, will be complemented by the charisma of mandolinist Avi Avital and Núria Rial, who has a crystalline soprano voice.

In the first half of the 18th century, all things Venetian fascinated elites from across Europe. The city portrayed by Canaletto also captivated visitors with its music. Many travelers remembered the distinctive custom of performing at night, including by ensembles playing from boats. The canzoni di battello, mostly anonymous and sung in the still-living Venetian dialect, covered a wide range of themes. However, they were not the only music to resound across the lagoon. Beyond St. Mark's Basilica, the opera houses, and Andrea Palladio's churches, high-quality music could also be heard in orphanages known as ospedali.

At one of them, located on the Riva degli Schiavoni, Father Antonio Vivaldi worked for many years. On New Year's Eve, NFM guests will have the chance to hear four famous concertos by this composer, in which he managed to depict the changes of the natural world as he knew it: Le Quattro stagioni. The solo parts of these timeless works will be performed by Avi Avital, transforming them into mandolin concertos. This world-renowned virtuoso specializes in early music and folk sounds from around the globe, and records for Deutsche Grammophon. The lyrical canzonas by an anonymous composer will be graced by Núria Rial, a Catalan artist, one of