no-one else has quite done this with the much-abused Four Seasons." AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE Read whole review
But I do think it a highly creative curiosity and a must-have. "A wholly irreverent and highly enlightened approach to the piece we all love to hate. like it or loathe it (I'm firmly of the former camp, I'm slightly embarrased to say!), it's all great fun." "This new version of The Four Seasons will certainly open your mind. Red Priest are having fun with these old favorites, but it is unpretentious fun, and, most importantly, it is dished up by people who know how this music works, and whose affection for the subject of their witty and anarchic fooling is never in doubt." GRAMOPHONE Read whole review enormously entertaining while genuinely capable of saying something about the music.
Completely wild and deeply imaginative, the album marries the work to the spirit of baroque spectacle and Venetian skulduggery." MUSIC WEEK This stuff is cheaper than cocaine, but there’s no way it should be legal." Red Priest’s performance on this disc is passionate but criminal, drunken and disorderly, manic and demonic, outrageous yet compulsive…. "If you think you know the Seasons, if you’ve heard it (or played it) far too often to ever want to hear it again – go straight out and buy this recording. Red Priest plays this music with a sense of verve and élan, and, in the process, has created a true crossover recording." SOUNDSTAGE Read whole review "This is a performance that the major labels have been striving to achieve (and failing miserably to accomplish): attempting to cross the classics with modern sensibilities. Good show!" ALL ABOUT JAZZ Read whole review A splendid baroque gift that will be praised as visionary and heretical in the same breath. who irreverently and intelligently deconstruct these war horses and provide the listener an experience as fresh as a spring strawberry bursting on the roof of your mouth. "Red Priest is a group of very intelligent period instrument specialists with a red-hot wicked sense of humor. This is The Four Seasons like you’ve never heard it before”. If you buy no other Red Priest recording you should own this one! Even the generally conservative Gramophone Magazine included it in their top four all-time recordings of the work, stating “there’s nothing like their blend of virtuosity and mahem. With this groundbreaking interpretation of Vivaldi’s much-loved classic Red Priest truly burst onto the international scene, and attracted rave reviews worldwide. The seminarians recorded the album under the direction of Christopher Alder, a Grammy Award-winning classical music producer and Christian Weigl, a Grammy Award-winning engineer.Red Priest’s recording of the Four Seasons was perhaps the defining moment in the group’s career. “We wanted to share how we pray on Christmas night.” “Christmas Matins have a great importance because they precede, immediately, the Christmas night Mass and one of the most solemn and beautiful moments of the liturgical year,” Vaz Guedes said. In the album, Vaz Guedes said, listeners will find the “life and prayer of a seminarian” during Christmas. Matins are part of the Divine Office, which priests and monks pray every single day. “I think music is one of the most perfect ways of exteriorizing the faith and one of the most profound ways to pray to God.” “We set about bringing our very best to recording music that was representative of the beauty found in the truth,” said Vaz Guedes, who discovered he could sing through Gregorian chant. The album includes a multi-lingual arrangement of “Stille Nacht”, along with several songs arranged by the seminarians themselves. “It was a very inspirational setting for recording this music,” he said.