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Back to basics, Kupman wants you to see haydon's "four seasons" in music.

author:Xinmin Evening News
Back to basics, Kupman wants you to see haydon's "four seasons" in music.

Photo: Tony Kupman conducts the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra

Fade away the complicated techniques, pursue the simple tone, and return to the authenticity of the score. Tonight (25 May), the Haydn oratorio "Four Seasons", conducted by Tonn Kupman and co-performed by the Amsterdam Baroque Choir, will be performed at the Shanghai Symphony Hall. Yesterday, Kupman said in an interview that he will recreate the era of Haydn's life in this work, allowing the audience to cross the time gap of more than 200 years and feel the most quaint and natural "four seasons" scenery.

Born in Zwolle, the Netherlands, Tonn Kupman received a classical music education in Amsterdam, studying organ, harpsichord and musicology. With a keen interest in ancient instruments and a penchant for the performance style of the literary school, Kupman focused on the music of the Baroque period and is now a leading figure in the trend of "authentic performances".

In order to show the "original taste" of Haydn's "Four Seasons", Kupman conducted a comprehensive "back to basics" special training for the band. The string part is instructed not to use kneading strings, but to use a straight tone as much as possible to show the sonic characteristics of ancient instruments; balance the proportion of the orchestra and choir in the sound effect. Because he was also a conductor and a harpsichord player, he continued to practice for 2 hours a day while rehearsing with the band and choir for more than 10 hours a day.

The reason why he chose "Four Seasons" in many of Haydn's works, Kupman bluntly said, is to use the most classical interpretation to arouse people's desire and yearning for nature. The lyrics for The Seasons are taken from the 18th-century English poet James Thomson's long poem of the same name. The 4,300-line poem was a huge success and became a bestseller for a while. Compiled by Van Schweiten, the long poem abandons the didactic part of the original text and selects scenes depicting natural life in the poem: heavy rains in summer, hunting in autumn, wine feasts on harvest days, and travelers in winter blizzards.

"'Four Seasons' celebrates a pastoral world with changing seasons and order, as if it were a call from the secular world." In Kupman's view, only by accurately interpreting according to the score and not adding too much interpretation can haydn's superb musical vocabulary be truthfully conveyed, so that the natural scenes in the lyrics are presented like oil paintings, and the pure pastoral world is brought to people's eyes. (Xinmin Evening News reporter Zhu Yuan)

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