Haimovitz’ Fourth PRIMAVERA Album

It is getting on to about a year and a half since PENTATONE released the third of the six albums planned by cellist Matt Haimovitz for his PRIMAVERA project. The fourth album will be released one week from today; and, like the first three albums, it will be available only for download. The hyperlink in the previous sentence leads to the MP3 Album Web page created by Amazon.com, which is currently processing pre-orders. Once again, no digital booklet is included with the download. Fortunately, there is, once again, a PENTATONE Web page that provides the track listing, an adequate account of all of the tracks, and a hyperlink for further information. The title of the new album is PRIMAVERA IV – the heart.

courtesy of PENTATONE

I have to confess that, the deeper I get into this project, the more I feel that fatigue is beginning to get the better of me. The album covers are “frames” taken from the large-scale painting by contemporary artist Charline von Heyl, conceived as a “response” to the “call” of Primavera, the massive canvas by Sandro Botticelli. As can been seen in the album cover shown above, the heart is present on the new cover, even if it is relatively modest in size. Any connection to Botticelli is left as an exercise for the listener/reader!

The source of fatigue, however, has nothing to do with von Heyl’s art work. Rather, it concerns the large number of individual composers, each represented by a single piece of relatively moderate length. There does not appear to be much, if any, logic in how those pieces are ordered. For that matter, the connection between each of those pieces and the title of the album is another “exercise for the listener;” and, while I like to think that I am an attentive listener, my mind has not yet figured out how to deal with this album (or any of its predecessors) as a whole. Indeed, I cannot even make a viable assertion that, over the course of my listening, at least one of the tracks on the album stands out as particularly memorable.

Mind you, I plan to stick with this project through the two remaining albums; but I am not counting on any flashes of insight that will make me a better listener!