Last year’s 300th anniversary of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons passed with surprisingly little comment, although this well-meaning but ploddingly stately movie emerged in Italy, based on Tiziano Scarpa’s prizewinning novel Stabat Mater, and imagining a musically inspired affaire de coeur between Antonio Vivaldi and a brilliant and beautiful teenage violinist – one of the female orphans at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà who are tutored by him in music.
Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri. We hear fragments of music that are clearly supposed to be tantalising early drafts of the Four Seasons, evolving in Vivaldi’s head – but exasperatingly we don’t hear the inspirationally catchy masterpiece itself until the final credits.
