Chiswick Chamber Orchestra Provides Seasonal Delight
Anthonia Chalmers enjoys an afternoon performance include Tallis and Vivaldi
Sandy Burnett, director of the Orchestra (left) and Kathryn Parry, leader(right)
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November 28, 2025
What a lovely time and venue for Chiswick Chamber Orchestra’s afternoon performance of Ralph Vaughan William’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” at St Michael and All Angels on Sunday 23 rd November. A week before Advent Sunday and the season of Christmas offerings, the concert attracted a large audience.
Following the Fantasia, written by Vaughan Williams for the 1910 Three Choirs Festival to be performed alongside Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius” (do go and enjoy the latter work featuring in the film, “The Choral”, created by Alan Bennet currently showing at Chiswick Cinema), we were blessed by an unusually enhanced, and to me hugely beneficial, preamble to the playing of each of Vivaldi’s four short sequential violin concertos: Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter by Father Fabrizio Pesce, Associate Vicar, reciting in the original Italian the sonetti (14-line sonnets) which Vivaldi set to music.
In the detailed four-page programme presented free to the audience, alongside the print version of the sonetti, were the English translations – what a wonderful prompt to the understanding of the music as well as to the enjoyment of its rendition!
The violin soloist (also conducting the orchestra as and when appropriate), Iwona Boesche, has apparently played the Vivaldi at least 150 times. To me, and perhaps many of us, familiarity of the work stems from the well-publicised 1989 recording and performances by Nigel Kennedy; we were stunned at the time by the virtuosic performance of this less formally dressed and spoken violinist. However, Sunday’s (also virtuosic) delivery of the poems with the audience now having some knowledge of the texts (probably written by Vivaldi himself) brought an additional intimacy between players and listeners.
Each three-movement concerto starts with an Allegro and finishes with an Allegro or Presto, the middle movement being either a Largo or an Adagio. Having the words in front of us, we could follow in Spring the bird songs, the murmuring streams interposed by a thunderstorm. The movement finishes delightfully with nymphs and shepherds dancing in welcome of the season’s arrival. (As a child I used to drive the adults mad by playing again and again on the radiogram “Nymphs and Shepherds”, set to music by Purcell and recorded on the Columbia label by Manchester Children’s Choir with the Halle Orchestra in 1929 – an unexpected great hit for years to come). Nymphs and shepherds evoke the arrival of a pastoral idyll.
Summer in Italy is hot and the second concerto with its harsher string playing reflects Vivaldi’s lesser appreciation of the heat and the storms. On the contrary, Autumn is another favoured season – the joy of harvest warmed by wine before sweet slumber. The movement finishes with hunters out and about with their horns, guns and dogs.
Winter is icy and windy and we can hear chattering teeth before finding warmth by the fire in the Largo. The winds battle in the final Allegro yet Winter brings joy.
What a great pre-Christmas treat!
Anthonia Chalmers
The event was sponsored by Whitman & Co Estate Agents
The next concert from the Orchestra is at St Michael and All Angels on Sunday 1 February 2026.
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