“Frozen river”by wilhelmja is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I’m extremely honored to have been commissioned to compose a set of original poems as companion pieces for the baroque masterpiece The Four Seasons by Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. The commission is part of a multidisciplinary collaboration involving music, poetry and visual digital media art.

Each of the four violin concertos in The Four Seasons gives voice to a different season of the year. The concertos were published as a set with four corresponding sonnets, which might also have been written by Vivaldi when he composed the concertos around 1717.

My job is to write new poems on the inspiration of this venerable music and the sonnets that originally accompanied it, and to read my poems in a performance of The Four Seasons Sept. 22 at 3 p.m. at the Columbus Performing Arts Center on Columbus’ Sunday at Central concert series. The performance will feature members of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and will showcase a new multimedia artwork by Denison University art professor Christian Faur.

The sonnets that originally appeared with The Four Seasons describe some of each season’s typical natural phenomena – spring flowers, intense summer heat, autumn harvest, winter cold and ice. I aim to mine the depths of Vivaldi’s music and of the emotional associations the music conjures in the context of today’s world, and thereby build bridges between Vivaldi’s world and ours.

Here are violinist Dmitri Sinkovsky and the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra with a wonderfully brittle performance of the “Winter” concerto from The Four Seasons:

My sincere thanks to David Niwa, artistic director of Sunday at Central, for inviting me into this fascinating collaboration.