A Story for Four Seasons: Vivaldi/Beauty and the Beast First, the backstory: The road to my involvement with theatre performance started when I was the soloist in a performance of Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre with my high school orchestra. I felt limited by the square meter of stage space stingily allocated to a classical musician, and so I decided to break out of it. I masked myself as Death and made motion into part of the drama of the piece by moving about, mysteriously appearing and disappearing, crowding through the orchestra and mingling with different sections of musicians as the score made me interact with them. My next step in this direction, also while still in high school, came about when I was invited by Mario Beretta (Swiss composer and musician) and Hansjörg Betschart (Swiss author and theater director) to perform as soloist and act in a professional theater production, A Story for Four Seasons, that intertwined a live performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons with the story of Beauty and the Beast. The cast of the production included four actors, a small orchestra, and myself. Hansjörg Betschart directed the piece; Mario Beretta conducted, performed at the cembalo and composed incidental music where the plot required it; and Lazlo Kish, Ursula Andermatt, Ueli Jäggi, and Cornelia Kempers were the company of actors. Betschart's actualization of the Beauty and the Beast plot was masterful, subtly weaving together this well-known tale with elements of Kabuki Theatre and urgent contemporary themes, such as incest and exploitation. Nearly everyone in the cast played multiple roles. My characters included a real village fiddler, imaginary soulmates of the actors, the hand of fate, and more. Maneuvering in almost complete darkness around rocky props and artificial lakes, and occasionally operating a marionette butterfly attached to the tip of my bow, I learned some important truths of interdisciplinary interaction, such as this: A cue from an actor is not the same thing as a cue from a musician... We premiered Eine Geschichte für Vier Jahreszeiten (A Story for Four Seasons) at the Zürich Opera House and together we performed this realization over fifty times in Switzerland through 1991 and 1992 (photos at the bottom of this page). In August 2002, Hansjörg Betschart mounted a revival of the show for the Viva Vivaldi Baroque music festival in Mexico City, with actors Arturo Barba, Samantha Salgado, Arturo Echeverria, Carmen Durand, and myself. These performances happened at the Teatro de la Ciudad de Mexico the production was filmed for Mexican National Television.